Experts Move to Bridge Digital Skill Gap

By Emma Okonji

Participants at the just concluded Social Media Week Forum in Lagos, have pledged their support to bridge the digital skills gap among Nigerian youths, which they said would help the country attain its digital transformation goals.

They equally called on the federal government to as a matter of urgency, develop sustainable models that would help bridge the digital skills gap among Nigerian youths.

According to them, majority of the youths lacked the requisite industry skills needed for the labour market, even after graduation from the university, adding that something urgent must be done to address the situation.

They said the call become necessary to enable Nigeria prepare her youths for digital transformation in today’s digital era.

Country Managing Director, Oracle Nigeria, Mr. Adebayo Sanni, had earlier decried the dearth of industry-based skills among youths and called for retraining of Nigerian youths in line with the demands of today’s digital era.

Speaking during a panel session with the theme: “Edtech and the Future of Work: Building Sustainable Models to Close the African Skill Gap”, the Chief Executive Officer of Future Software Resources Ltd., Nkemdilim Begho, said to achieve a sustainable model that could close the skill gap, the government needed to catch up on closing the digital divide by investing more in training the younger generation, even after they must have left the university.
“Youths should be trained on technologies that would prepare them ahead for the future of work.With the Internet, there is so much the young ones can learn, even without formal education.

“The truth is that we have to start thinking of what education really means to us as individuals, corporate, training schools, government and as a nation,” she said.

Begho said global research data shows that 60 per cent of children under age 12 today, would grow up to work in jobs that don’t exist yet, and it is not different on the continent.

She said Nigeria already had a huge unemployment rate and a growing youth population, noting that we could either prepare our youth for the future or potentially face a major crisis.

Founder of Univelcity, Joseph Agunbiade, said the technology sector was demanding new talents, noting that Nigeria was not bridging the skill gap yet.
“The challenge is that as Nigerians, we are still stuck to the traditional ways of doing things, and that narrative needs to change so that we can compete with other countries in terms of technology and education.

“We need to compress the education curriculum; for example, there are some fields of medicine that would be eradicated by artificial intelligence very soon,” Agunbiade said.

Also, the Managing Director, Edo State Skills Development Agency, Ukinebo Dare, said government needed to dismantle the current process for approving courses in the universities to be able to meet up with where the world is going.

According to her, parents should take it upon themselves to train and educate their children from the age of five on technology and coding.
On the part of Edo State Government, Dare said the state government had been doing a lot of awareness and training on technology.

“The Edo government has partnered Mainone to have access to high speed broadband internet at the location we use for training residents.

“We see a lot of tech jobs coming to Edo and we have trained over 22,000 people in different areas cutting across the technology sector,” Dare said.

According to her, it was time to transform our educational system across the continent in readiness for the jobs of the future, which will require digital and 21st-century skills.