In the days of yore, Nigerian tertiary education was divided into about three. They are the universities, the polytechnics and the technical colleges. Each was distinct and unique and had the classes of Nigerians that each catered for. Once a child was discovered to be creative, he or she was whisked into the technical college to hone his craft. Some did practical courses in automobile engineering, carpentry and wood Design, Steel works, Welding, Sewing, Weaving and Handcraft to mention a few. Upon graduation some got scholarships to further hone their chosen crafts abroad and got employments with foreign automobile, textiles, and steel companies while some came back to work with foreign companies who had come to invest in Nigeria.
If you studied Agriculture in the university, your business was in the farm or the fields and not just in the class room calculating mathematics. But we got carried away by certification and one tertiary institution was made to feel superior to the other and so became the craze to acquire certificate while most could not even stand to defend them. Graduates have no understanding of the course they studied. The institutions continued to churn out graduates who are not absorbed by the labour market. Some had to find jobs that were not in line with their discipline just to survive. Geologists began to work in banks, mechanical engineers became news men, and linguists became event planners and decorators. Chemists turned make-up artist and so on.
The reality stares us in the face that in order to survive in this next decade you have to be creative and innovative. You have to understand a societal need and try to meet it. Certificate is almost useless now;your creativity will pave a way for you. Hence, a need for the coming generation to discover their talents early.
This year, we did our office overhaul. Part of it was to change the furniture. Three carpentry outfits submitted their quotation and samples of their work. We interviewed them then told their bosses to come at different intervals to fix one or two things up. We wanted to be sure they didn’t contract the job out and that they could handle the project. We eventually chose one and negotiations started. I knew even though we tried to be prudent and tough in negotiation and got a fair deal out of the bargain, that carpenter smiled to the bank with a very good deal. It was a win-win situation.
What am I saying? Most people may not always need the white collar workers but people will always need the “blue collar” ones or what we call artisans. You’ll need a carpenter, you’ll need an electrician, you will need an automobile mechanic, a generator repairer, a tailor, a dry cleaner, an air conditioner or fridge mechanic, you will need to build your house, to run your electric wire in your house, you buy your metal doors for security, to paint your house, to fix plumbing, to plant your gardens. The needs are endless. The market is big and fertile. Once you can prove yourself, there is no end to how much you can make. A blue collar worker is hardly ever broke. He can make in one job what his white collared brother sits in the office to make in sixty days.
You collect your salary and allowance where you work for 30 days. Yet you have to disburse it to these classes of people who provide needed service. You have to wait to work another thirty days but these creative people will provide their services to a minimum of four families within a month. Now do the math. And they break even. They do their own project albeit not as obvious as the white collar worker whom everyone feels earns more because he is corporately dressed and drives a second hand car.
Work dynamics are changing. The labour market is saturated and to get a formal job is not a walk in the park anymore. Truth is the formal job is becoming obsolete and highly overrated. There is a new global market and the players must be strictly innovative and creative people. There is already a shift from the orthodox but fruitless method of carrying certificates and knocking from door to door to get a job. People are making money once they have little cash to start up and fund their creativity. And it takes only one deal to sell yourself.
Don’t smirk at the young woman selling her fried potatoes and coleslaw at the tiny corner shop at the streets or the ones visiting your office on hot afternoons to sell chilled fruit salad or juice, or the guy in simple overalls who has come to fix the burnt wires in your air conditioner, or the carpenter who owns a shop near your house, or your automobile mechanic in his greasy overalls, or at the graduate who owns the tailor shop at the next street to yours or the guy that repairs your phones at the neigbourhood market.
They are the real MVPs taking over the global economy.
and then