What exactly is employ me.com stands for and what informed its establishment?
employ me.com is a new innovation in the country. It is different from every other human resources company ever exits in the country. What makes it distinct? What we basically see here in Nigeria are job sites calling for curriculum vitae directly or through referral and then probably consulting firms to hire best categories of workforce for companies and once they have completed the process, they have no interest on what happens to the left over who could not be absorb. But the need to have steady pool of talents where companies can easily go and look at those talents, call them if they are measured up to their expectations makes us to fill that gap. So it is in that aspect that we are trying to get employable people to feed the small and medium scale enterprises in Nigeria and we must understand that small and medium scale enterprises are the future of Nigeria’s economy. And if we don’t have the necessary manpower or required workforce, if you don’t have the requisite skills and experienced and talented workforce that will leverage work for them, it will be a serious drawback for us as a country. Those talents are what we are after.
But your company’s vision to get the right people into paid employment seems to run contrary to the country’s campaign for graduates and youths to embrace self reliance, what do you have to say on this?
The home truth is that everybody cannot be employer. Everyone cannot be entrepreneur. There are people given to work and there are people naturally talented as entrepreneurs. And if you have a company that has a capacity of employing one hundred workers for instance, that company may be an idea of just one man. So, the need to have right people to work there cannot be over emphasising. Yes of course, people have been talking about the entrepreneurship, self reliance and private businesses, but then they cannot do everything alone. They need staff. Soul of every business, soul of every entrepreneur is the staff driving that business. Any company or business without the right and quality staff won’t last for a long time before collapsing and that is the major problems of many of our companies in the country today. Most of the things we have been doing in Nigeria are theory. There is neither been mentoring nor apprenticeship. We just start up a good idea and then expecting to be raking in money. It is a different ball game from the field to the classrooms. We should ask ourselves why some entrepreneurs failed? It is not because they have not given themselves an opportunity to even have apprenticeship for say three, six weeks or more or have mentoring programmes from people that had walked through the same path. So, when we are now going down to the workforce, managers, how does an entrepreneur or a business owner react in terms of emotional intelligence, capacity to build staff, leadership quality and leadership skills. These are things entrepreneurs must be equipped with to be able to carry the workforce along.
From your finding so far on the field, how do you see Nigerian graduates?
Nigeria generally is a group of talented people. But the system has portrait them not to know what they are doing. Everybody keeps saying Nigerian graduates are half-baked, and some are even saying they are now quarter-baked. But if you look at the input, every system you input something into where you want to get something out. So what have been giving to Nigerian graduates overtime I will tell you were not that encouraging. We just saw recently a graduate from the University of Lagos graduating with a perfect score. These are the lot of Nigerians and where did he come from. He went to a community school in Ajegunle and not a high brow school in Ikoyi or Victoria Island. People of his kind are scattered all over. But sometimes they get frustrated just like the same UNILAG guy who JAMB wanted to frustrate. So, these are the lots of Nigerians. Now talking about our graduates, Nigerians go abroad and excel in their studies. There is no country you won’t see Nigerians among the best workforce in their organisations. So, what I am driving at is that Nigerians are talented people but the system has made us to come out as if we don’t know what we are doing. So that is what we have been seeing overtime. Those days, there was teachers’ training colleges and the teachers then go for sandwich programmes in the universities and did very well in class. The system is jettisoned with the introduction of 6-3-3-4 education policy. Before now, the polytechnics were purely on manpower training and development while colleges of education also had specific mandate of producing teachers and universities were purely academic. But crave for university education has changed the whole thing. Now, everybody wants to go to university because of paper qualifications and not because of skills acquisition.
You are saying the problem is that of the system, what exactly wrong with the system?
It is about the policy. We must have to review our education policies and programmes. That should be a framework for this government. If we don’t review the policies to make every graduate that comes out of university worth his salt, it will be more difficult to get employable Nigerians in future. So, our emphasis on universities running purely academic for four years is not good enough. We must have an opening where students go out midway into their studies and acquire on-the field experience of what they have learnt in class. This is not about SIWES or internship which many students are doing without serious supervision from schools. Some don’t even go anywhere and yet get covering letters from relations or friends. That is why part of our mandates is to go round campuses and enlighten students most especially those about graduating on what to do to prepare themselves well beyond class works. So, the education policies in Nigeria need complete overhauling in tandem with the global best practices.
Then what do you have to say about the disparity between the university and polytechnic graduates in terms of certificates in the labour market?
From experience, most of graduates from polytechnic s and colleges of education tend to do better in terms of practical than their counterparts from the university and vice versa in writing, theories and presentations. And if we take that to the field, I will tell you that the rate of passing professional exams like ICAN, ACCA, CIPM and a host of others is higher among polytechnic graduates but unfortunately, government has quietly neglected that particular aspect of education and rather concentrating on those who want to acquire purely academic degrees. We need to change that orientation to put Nigeria in a right track