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| Mr George Odok Jnr |
George Odok Jnr|21 September 2017
A number of factors could be responsible for the inability of Nigerian graduates to secure gainful employment or even maintain steady jobs.
I tend to agree with Miss Fara Fasuyi, a management consult who heads the School of Enterprise at the prestigious Ibadan Business School, Ibadan, Oyo State. According to her, chief among the factors to blame for the growing youths unemployment is the lack of appropriate skills set on the part of the applicants as well as poor work ethics.
Besides, she said the poor curriculum in most varsities is such that is completely out of tune with the requirements of modern times, thus majority of Nigerian graduates can’t compete with their peers anywhere in the world.
The global era has further added in compounding some of these issues. Just yesterday, I was invited to be in a panel were some applicants were to be interviewed for a job in a federal agency.
After the written test, the applicants were given 40 minutes break to rest and prepare for the oral interview. While we were marking the test script, I came across the word “Informassion”. Perhaps, the writer wanted to spell “information”.
The drama did not end they, the writer went ahead to use ‘msg’ in place of “message”, this is social media language been used in a job interview in a federal government agency.
When going through the second script, question 4 was: Who is the President of Nigeria, and this female applicant wrote “President Muhammad Bwari”, this is very shocking that a Nigerian graduate cannot spell correctly, the name of the President.
Our youths are so used to social media language, such that they now transfer such to the conventional writing. This is very bad!
It is quite disconcerting to note that majority of our universities are out of tune with what’s happening in the rest of the world. You can imagine that some of the courses which were taught some five decades ago are still being taught with little or no innovation.
Contrary to the belief out there, I can say with every sense of responsibility that there are a handful of jobs out there whether in the area of enterprise development or white-collar jobs. The missing links however is that not many graduates can meet the set criteria for such jobs.
George Odok Jnr
Is a Journalist, writes from Calabar
