The Need
A quick scan of the Nigerian situation will reveal to the discerning eye that the number one yearning of the teeming population in Nigeria is dignified employment. Nigeria has an alarming rate of unemployment brought about by a coalescence of several factors:

• Our development situation where the government is the largest employer of labour.
• The lack of manufacturing and value-adding industrial proceees which encourages importation and kills local industries.
• The university system which focuses on generic degrees and minimal specialization for the industries.
• The lack of career counseling and guidance in for students which would inform the course of study in a higher institution.
• The apathy on the part of parents to allow their children study courses in their areas of strength rather than the preference of the parents.
• Corporate Nigeria’s dwindling investments in staff training and development.

The amalgam of these factors has created a vacuum between the actual skills needed by the industry and those possessed by the graduates. It has become increasingly difficult for the Nigerian graduate to get a job. The few graduates who manage to get jobs often find themselves in classic unemployment or end up in careers that are neither challenging nor fulfilling.

The Employment and Career Development Clinic organised by the Talent Quartet: IDEASBRIDGE, Talent and Dexterity, Talent Right and Witty Inventions, has been designed to address these challenges in five innovative ways:

• Employability Skills Training
• Career Development Workshops
• Alliances with organisations that provide technical skills (NIIT, Karkrox e.t.c.)
• Strategic Partnerships with HR firms, Consultancies and Recruitment organisations.
• Industry partnerships with employers of labour.

Employability Skills Training
These refers to learned ability that is requisite for employment and success in a certain career or industry. Several industries have different clusters of skills that are particularly relevant and required for entrants into the industry. This is what protectionist professions (Law and Medicine) teach and test for at specialized schools and institutions. Other industries simply created training schools to provide new recruits with these skills. Economic downturn and dwindling profits have closed down many training schools in Nigeria. Organisations now demand (without saying so, except in vacancy announcements) that graduates possess the skills that they would love new entrants to possess!

Research has identified skill clusters that employers now demand of entry-level graduates in Nigeria especially in the sectors that are experiencing phenomenal growth and dynamism. These skills could be grouped into two major classes: Soft skills and Technical skills.

Soft skills refer to the intangible skills of people management, sales and marketing, customer handling, and other interpersonal skills.

Technical skills refer to core functional competencies that are required of graduates of disciplines like Computer Science, Engineering, Surveying and other professions that demand specialized problem resolution routes, registers and professional protocols.

The (un)employment situation in Nigeria has somewhat blurred the distinction between this categorizations as most Nigerian firms now employ entry level graduates from different disciplines, ferreting them with aptitude tests, psychometric evaluations and interviews that determine the fate of new graduates. Most times, a mixture of both skill groups is required for interview success and employment.

The poignant questions: are Nigerian graduates taught these skills in universities? Are they armed with requisite skills required to excel at these interviews and careers? Where do they get these skills?

Our Programme
Technically-minded institutions like NIIT have created programmes that fill the technical deficiencies and upskill new graduates in the core technical skills required for employment especially in the computing quadrant. The Employability Training Programme provides a suite of the soft skills required for entry level jobs. The suite of courses includes the following:

• Creating a personal brand for employment
• Writing a unique CV and attending an interview
• Self management Skills
• Basic communication skills
• Basic Sales Skills
• Front Office Management Skills
• Customer Care and Contact Centre skills
• Basic Microsoft Office Skills

Graduates who hitherto lacked these skills will be equipped with new skills in order to better their chances of employment.

Career Development Workshops
These are workshops designed to explore the reality of getting more than a job: a career. Experts and Human resource managers will be invited to share new insight on career management, career choices, career progression, career paths in their industries. These workshops will also focus on the challenges and the rewards of working in a particular industry as seen by an insider. The aim is to provide a peep into the workings of the industry before you make a career choice in that industry. These series of workshops will also address the dynamics of psychometric tests, aptitude tests, management traineeship and graduate schemes. The workshops will also teach students and parents how to use cutting edge personality profiling and skill-set identification tools to determine their personal profiles and explore career options. Experts will explore the impact these selection techniques have on the career prospects of graduates and the recruitment brand of organisations. The workshops will be interactive and deep enough to provide valuable insight for the serious-minded graduate who wishes to make an informed career choice.

Technical Alliances
Our aim is to build technical alliances with organisations that provide technical skills (NIIT. Karkox and others) to provide implant training programmes for participants in our programme. The realization that technical training is expensive is a major consideration for this alliance as a lot of graduates who have a leaning towards technical training often avoid these training because of the huge capital investments. We intend to open discussions with these institutions in order to provide basic training during our programme at a subsidised rate are inclined with a view to discovering the talent of graduates who are talented in database management, wed design, software and applications design, network administration, hardware installation maintenance, system auditing and other applications of computing. Participant who apply themselves and display their talent will be offered scholarships or subsidized tuition in order to assist their cause for employment.

Strategic Partnerships
A crucial goal of this initiative is to create a steady channel through which our participants can be given opportunities to get viable employment. We shall be creating a database of partner organisations, mainly human resource management firms, recruitment agencies, placement organisation and recruiters. Carefully chosen managers of these firms will be invited to present their views during our Career Workshops. We will share the data of our participants with these organisations free and monitor to ensure that they are invited for interviews and given opportunities to display their talent. We will open avenues for feedback by sending evaluation forms to these organisations in order to get invaluable feedback on the performance of our “graduates”.