18 Years After, Poise Relaunches Graduate Finishing Academy

Ogechukwu Obi

Poise Nigeria Limited, a personality and image consultancy in Africa, aimed at making great executives through its various training programmes that are designed to leave participants rightly equipped and globally competitive, recently relaunched its Graduate Finishing Academy (GFA).

Briefing journalists in Lagos recently, the Chief Marketing Officer, Asher Adeniyi said Poise’s pursuit for excellence in the delivery of its training programmes, as well as the drive to ensure that participants are provided with up-to-date 21st century skills and capabilities, necessitated the relaunch.

Asher said the PGFA was designed as the organisation’s unique response to the problem of youth unemployment in Nigeria, adding that Poise had about eight years ago, identified lack of essential skills for the 21st century workplace by young executives as the reason for their inability to secure their dream jobs and thus created the PGFA to bridge the gap.

While stating that Poise has been around for over 18 years, Adeniyi said it has been 18 years of remarkable progress and success stories. “Our curriculum is tested and approved by the National Universities Commission (NUC); we also have the support of the presidency. Ours is a training programme we need to expose to more young executives that are looking for jobs or want to change their jobs, but lack the skills to get the desired job. What we do is to bridge the gap.

“We are here to relaunch a programme that will not only equip young executives, but also enhance their soft skills, as well as the opportunity to learn other technical and global skills.”

He said the programme, which started as a 12-week programme, will now run for 10 weeks, adding that participants will be awarded a Psense certification at the completion of their training.

“The first five weeks will be essentially targeted towards the soft skills, while the remaining five weeks will be focused on learning other global skills that will aid youth employment. This will significantly improve the capacity of the young executives that come through our programmes.”

He stated that Poise adopts 21st century method in the delivery of its training. “So we are not just going to be facilitating sessions of soft skills, we are going to be facilitating sessions that will improve the ICT skills, the technical skills and the business knowledge skills. The target is not for them to excel only by who they are but also by what they know and what they can do.”

Reiterating the company’s commitment to manpower development, the Chief Operating Officer, Nonye Cally-Bechi said Poise is basically into helping individuals to be better in whatever they do. “In these 18 years, we have worked with individuals, corporations in both public and private sectors in their personality development. So we train people from all walks of life in different aspects of soft skills and over the years, we have also diversified into other areas. About three years ago, Poise through its CSR programme started what is called the ICT academy and one of it is the Eko Bit.

“Eight years ago, we identified a gap; we noticed that we have so many graduates around but they are not employable. This is because they do not have employability skills. So, we started the Poise Graduate Academy to bridge the gap between what we have from our various tertiary institutions and what is made available to the workplace; and in the past eight years, we have trained about 40,000 youths on employability skills.”