Jobberman to up-skill 5m young Nigerians, appoints Ambassador in LASU

Success Damian:

Programme Manager Implementation, Jobberman, an internationally renowned career development organization, Precious Imuwahen Ajoonu, has stated that one of the mandates of her company is to get 5million young Nigerians up-skilled and placed in dignified jobs in the next five years.

Ajoonu made the revelation at a two-day Jobberman/LASU Career Fair 2020 which took place at the University Auditorium of the Lagos State University, Ojo, Lagos on Tuesday.

“One of our mandates at Jobberman is to get 5million young Nigerians up-skilled and placed in dignified work in the next five years,” Ajoonu disclosed.

She also hinted that the organization would create a Jobberman Ambassador in Lasu. “We are going to create a Jobberman Youth Ambassador here in Lasu and universities across the country where they have a sustainable strategy toward youth engagement and employment,” Ajoonu said.

On the reason Jobberman chose to partner with Lasu she said, “Lasu sits directly in our purview in that they have a young population, people in 300 level can benefit from our internship opportunity, they have graduates who are worried about the future in terms of job, so we feel it is very good to come here, meet with them, teach them employability skills, things like CV writing, cover letter, how do I apply for a job, how do I attend an interview? 

On the second day we are bringing employers to the campus, who will be interviewing on spot and offering things like internships and possible placements. So we chose Lasu specifically because Lagos is one of our strategic focus areas to help with youth employment.”

Ajoonu stated that Jobberman also focuses on other areas of the nation’s economy like agriculture, the creative industry, and of course the traditional white choler job. “I must stress that we are not only focusing on white choler job, in terms of placements, there is a lot happening in agriculture in the country, I would be able to say I can get you 10,000 farmers for example and move people from Lagos to the North. We are encouraging young people to think out of the box, and not just focusing on I want to become an Engineer, and of course enterprise, how many people are willing to start make up business, making akara, how do you even bring awareness into it, create an app to help the business, how do you use technology to disrupt the status quo? Those are our concern.”

On the saying that Nigerian youths are unemployable she said, “We have over 2million people on our data base and we have access to over 60,000 employers, when we started this intervention we sat down with these employers and they said Precious these graduates are not employable. So what we did was do a skill gap analysis because, yes, they are not employable, but what do we do? Do we leave them and then we have crisis in society or do we help them?

“So as an institution, thanks to our donor partners, Jobberman is building a soft skills curriculum based on the gaps that have been identified, our university curriculum are outdated, they are not relevant for our digital workforce, so we are creating a curriculum where we train these people, so these people sitting in Lasu once they get into our data base, they are going to go through those globally recognized training, be certified, then we can go back to the employer to say we have skilled these people, can you please find opportunities for them? 

Director, Lasu Career Centre, Dr. Igot Ofem, on her part said there is a mismatch between the curriculum and what the employers are actually looking for. She said “What the career centre strives to do is trying to bridge that gap, and see how we can link our students to the world of work.”

She stated further that the country needed more human development centres “We need more human development centres in Nigeria, although I am aware that NUC at a point in time was trying to revise the curriculum to include something like this, but Lagos State University is the very first university to have a career development centre.” 

Ofem disclosed that the Vice Chancellor has mandated the career centre to ensure that Lasu students are 90% employable and marketable. 

“The Vice Chancellor has that idea, he told me once that this centre you are trying to establish, I want my students to be 90% employable and marketable, so that is really our mandate, we are out to make sure we link them. Last week we had people from US coming to teach them Robotics; sometime in December a UK firm came to teach them data analysis. You know the world is changing and it is going digital, so we try to move with the trend, what is really out there and how do we bring it here,” she said.