One of the key strategies for young Nigerians to thrive in 2025 is to invest in their personal growth and ability to create value.
Understanding the importance of this, two young brothers Joshua Agboola and Caleb Agboola, co-founded Youngtechlearners with the support of their parents with the mission to train and empower other young people with technology skills and inspire them to pursue tech careers. Their goal is to empower thousands of young people with tech skills through the tech training programmes of Youngtechlearners.
In pursuing this mission, Joshua and Caleb held a tech skills training and empowerment programme in partnership with the Estate Baptist Church, Ota, Ogun State, on the 4th and 5th of January 2025.
The 2-day intensive programme featured sessions in Introduction to Programming, Graphic Design, Animation Creation, Content Creation, and Career Talks. The programme was focused on giving the participants an early jolt of inspiration and skill acquisition that they could run with for the rest of the year.
Joshua Agboola is no stranger to the tech space, having won several awards and recognitions for his technology feats as a young programmer, speaker on technology topics, and Future Skills Activist.
Joshua is involved in advocacy for the teaching of tech skills to young people early and he is a knowledge coach on Joshfortech, his YouTube channel. He has been able to inspire his younger brother Caleb, who is now specializing in animation, motion graphics, and creative content production.
The programme started on the first day with the delivery of an insightful career talk by Bayo Agboola who emphasised the importance of acquiring technology skills to the participants.
He informed the learners that technology impacts everything in our present time and will impact their future careers.
He also informed the participants that WAEC had started test-running computer-based exams to go fully digital, while the UTME for admission to Universities, popularly called JAMB, was already fully computer-based.
Consequently, he revealed to the learners that the computer keyboard is the new writing tool for the student of today, and any student who ignores acquiring tech skills does so at his or her own academic and career peril.
The opening career talk was continued by a presentation on the “Opportunities in Technology” by Joshua Agboola. This was followed by a session of hands-on introduction to programming by Joshua.
He guided the learners through the basics of programming by using Scratch to provide a strong foundation for the exploration of programming. He then transitioned to teaching basic web development, where the learners were introduced to the use of HTML and CSS.
Following the introductory web development session, the focus shifted to graphic design.
Tobi Oluwatumisile, the graphic design instructor, introduced the trainees to CorelDRAW, a powerful design software. Tobi then demonstrated the key tools and features of the CorelDRAW software. The class then participated in a practical designing of a programme banner. It was inspiring to participants to see how simple geometric shapes, texts, and colours are transformed into beautiful graphic works by using the software.
The second day began with a session on content creation anchored by Henrietta Agboola.
Henrietta taught the learners the basics of content creation explaining the importance of understanding their target audience and focusing on a niche. She shared practical examples from her own experience of creating content and generating income on YouTube to inspire learners to start their journey of content creation.
The segment that followed was a hands-on training session on animation and motion graphics handled by 11-year-old Caleb Agboola. Caleb laid the foundation with the explanation of 5 of the 12 principles of animation.
He explained the concepts of squash and stretch, anticipation, straight ahead, and pose to pose.
He then proceeded to introduce the participants to Opentoonz, a free open-source animation software, by explaining the features and tools of the software. He followed this by guiding the learners on how to animate a bouncing ball which was then transformed into a hopping rabbit.
Caleb proceeded to take the learners step-by-step through the process of animating the character of a boy chewing food.
To inspire the learners about what they could do if they acquire animation skills, Caleb concluded his session with the premiere and watching of “Compass, not Clock”, a short animation skit he just produced with his team at Imodola studios. The learners were excited and concluded the watching of the skit with a round of applause for what their young facilitator had created with his animation skills.
The session that followed was the continuation of the basics of programming using HTML and CSS. Participants were introduced to Javascript basics. The session was jointly handled by Joshua Agboola and Emmanuel Odunmbaku and the focus was to get the learners to build their personal profile website. At the end of the session, the learners who concluded their project had an exciting time proudly displaying the first website they had ever built in just 2 days of training.
The programme was brought to a conclusion by a charge by Bayo Agboola to the participants not to take for granted all they had learned in the 2 days of training by Youngtechlearners just because it was free. He encouraged them to take personal responsibility for their individual growth by researching more deeply into the things they had learned.
He concluded by informing the participants that “to whom much is given much is expected”. Youngtechlearners has a target to empower thousands of young people with tech skills and will be organizing similar training programmes in partnership with schools, communities, and other stakeholder organizations throughout the year.
and then