Ugo Aliogo
The Managing Director, U-Connect and Gr8jobsng, Omomene Odike, has said the establishment of a standardised education curriculum will be a catalyst to Nigeria’s employability shortfall.
Odike, disclosed this recently in Lagos, at the second edition of project employ career fair organised by Gr8jobsng tagged: “Project Employ 2.0: Repositioning Our Youth for a Digital Tomorrow.”
“In Western societies, you find out that everything concerning education whether it is at the secondary school or tertiary levels are standardised. The standardisation is very vital and we don’t have that here; therefore, there is a need for the government to take a conscious effort to get all stakeholders involved, and until we improve governance framework, we are not going to make much progress,” she said.
She also noted that Nigerian universities were working in silos at the moment, hence the need for a unified and codified process of transferring employability skills across the country, “employability courses need to be entrenched into secondary school curriculum.”
Odike, said there was no consistent pattern in government’s employability initiatives, adding that most of the employability issues in societies are more political than geared towards solving a problem.
Therefore, he said there was need for the impact of employability initiative to be measurable.
According to her, “The 2019 career fair focuses more on repositioning the youth for the digital space. We have noticed that there has been a shift from having people who have the certification and qualifications, to people who have the skills.
“The feedback from the last career fair, indicated that lot of the youths do not understand the idea of the digital space and the future of work on the global stage, as a result there is a need to continually engage the youth on platforms that can prepare their mind ahead, with lots of training and discussion on the future of work.”
In his remarks, the chairman of Ubong King Foundation, Ubong King, said, problem identification was the beginning of opportunities, noting that anywhere there is a problem, there is an opportunity.
“We have over 62.5 million youths that cannot be employed because they don’t have skills, and why they don’t why skills is that they are not trained for skills.”
King opined that the way forward is to reposition the educational sector to develop skills acquisition, while calling on government to get right people involved in the system, and institutions of learning should assist in discovering the potential of individuals and how to groom it.
