Folusho Odegbaike, lead consultant at HYT Consulting, has revealed that Nigeria’s ‘Japa’ syndrome is no reason to cry over spilt milk, but an opportunity to step in and train those who remain with soft skills to increase employability in the nation.
She made the call during her company’s 10th year anniversary celebration, which coincides with Nigeria’s Independence Day, October 1.
At the event, Odegbaike, a highly accomplished human capital management consultant with over 20 years of practical experience in various aspects of Human Capital Learning and Development, Performance Management, Customer Service, and other core Human Resources and Administration functions, explained that having worked in HR for a number of years her passion for growing people helped her find a calling as a training specialist, which eventually berthed HYT Consulting.
She said, “We have been in business for 10 years now, even though we started pretty small like every SME. I started out of my office in another organisation because the MD of the organisation I was working for believed that I should own a business in that line.
“During my tenure as the head of Human Resources, I assumed responsibility for the entire HR operations and successfully undertook a comprehensive restructuring of the HR division, aligning it with best practices. This strategic overhaul played a pivotal role in guiding the company, which had a workforce of over 700 employees, to achieve its corporate objectives. HYT started to grow from there. I wouldn’t say it has been easy, but it’s been worth the trouble.”
Speaking on the company’s latest expansion into a standard training school 10 years after, the certified SAP HCM and project management professional with a solid grasp of the Prince2 Project Management Methodology explained that she wanted to continue the vision of training for as long as she could, “One thing I wanted to have is a big training school. I knew what I wanted in my head but I couldn’t articulate it until someone introduced Mr Teju Ajayi of ‘The Architects Place’ to me.
“When I saw the 3D, I was blown away. Months later, it became reality. Now, we have training classes, and the idea is that because we have identified that there is a gap in the country, there is unemployment and unemployability, which is the biggest problem, really. The effort we are putting together now is to bridge the gap between a graduate and unemployability and that’s what we hope to achieve with the training sessions that we have.
“Our major point is to bring qualified candidates to clients. Once we train people, we deploy them and then they go on from there.”
On Nigeria’s prevailing ‘japa’ problem, she added, “There are some people that still want to remain in the country. Let’s not cry over spilt milk, japa has happened, but we still have a lot of graduates around, and we can bring them from where they are to where organisations expect them to be. Once we were able to bridge the gap, we discovered that it is not the technical skills that are missing because universities take care of that, it is the soft skills that are missing. That gap is what we intend to bridge.
“The Japa syndrome is not so bad because we are not a nation without human beings. We have a lot of graduates, so if we are able to bridge that gap, as long as people continue to Japa, we will be able to fill that gap with the fresh people that are leaving schools today.”
Odegbaike holds a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Lagos. Additionally, she is an active member of several professional institutes, including the Society of Human Resources Management (SHRM), Chartered Institute of Personnel Development U.K (CIPD), and Nigerian Institute of Training & Development (NITAD).
READ ALSO FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE
and then