The Easy Way to Get a Job

Timothy Yakubu Aboh, a human resource expert, advises fresh graduates through a book he has authored on how they can get employed easily

Timothy Yakubu Aboh, a human resource expert, has through research identified the causes of the unemployment problem ravaging the Nigerian society. To him, poor job hunting habits, wrong career choices, poor and inappropriate educational preparation and lack of outstanding performance in job interviews are the main reasons why the nation’s graduates remain unemployed for a long time.

It is to curb the unemployment menace that Aboh has come out with a book, War Against Unemployment: Battles You Must Win. The book which was based on his 25 years experience as a human resources practitioner is targeted at young, unemployed and underemployed graduates. It teaches how more youths can easily secure jobs in the Nigerian labour market where getting a job has been difficult.

Aboh told Newswatch that Nigerian graduates needed proper education that would prepare them for the few jobs available in the couantry. He said that it was worrisome that most Nigerian graduates do not know how to prepare curriculum vitae, prepare and perform very well at job interviews unlike foreign trained graduates who prepare well for such engagements before leaving school. “In American and European universities, we have employment agencies or services that educate students on the job market requirements for their chosen career,” he said.

He explained that the inefficient training of Nigerian graduates from the universities does not prepare them well for their chosen career and as such, multinationals have to help in training the applicants to make them suitable for the jobs. That, he said, adds to the cost of employing Nigerian graduates which many of the multinational companies operating in the country want to avoid. “The well run companies have no time to train graduates, they want a graduate that would be given a desk and a computer to start the job. The time it takes for the graduate to learn the job before he becomes a prepared graduate to work is too expensive for the multinationals, so they want to avoid it as much as possible. It is unbelievable that a person trained as an engineer does not know how to operate a computer. So, those are the major current causes of unemployment at the graduate level in Nigeria today,” he said.

To Aboh, the road map for employment creation initiated by Goodluck Jonathan, Nigerian president, is a good step in the right direction. But his fear is implementation of the policy as similar policies in the past had been hampered by corruption and inadequate statistics on unemployed Nigerians. “It is a very good idea, my fear is implementation and the other question that deserves answers: will corruption allow the funds go into job creation? If it goes into job creation, how will they measure its performance? If the jobs are created what are the qualities of graduates that are going to take up the jobs? If the jobs are created and we don’t have the qualified graduates to pick them up, then the problem of unemployment has not been solved,” he said. 

He advised the government to lay as much emphasis on improving the quality of the Nigerian graduates as on the creation of jobs.  Aboh said one of the best ways for parents to prepare their children for the job market is to discourage them from exam malpractices and encourage them to gain working experiences before completing their studies. “In overseas, once you finish your secondary school, while making effort to acquire a degree you pick up a job and gain experiences. It is because we don’t have such opportunities in Nigeria that our graduates come out of the universities without experience,” he said. For the government, Aboh said that policies should be introduced that would encourage companies operating in the country to establish their own training schools for employed graduates and discourage tapping from others that might have spent their resources on graduate trainees.