Strategic learning interventions boosts human capital

They observe that Nigeria’s worrying high percentage of unemployed graduates is as a result of disconnect between the realities of the market and the knowledge the various tertiary institutions impart on their students.

Researchers say by 2020, human knowledge will double every 12 hours across the globe. Experts are worried that Nigeria appears not prepared to respond to this new exponential issue, which will have huge impact on it workforce.

Experts in their various summations at a recent HR Leaders forum in Lagos insist that to achieve competitiveness, effectiveness among workforce both in the public and private sectors, there is the need for organisations to revisit workforce development using the right approach to training.

Enase Okonedo, dean, Lagos Business School, observes that with employers still complaining about shortfall in getting the right talents among the pool of graduates yearly, it is important for organisation to realign their training methods to help meet organisational needs.

“There are graduates but they don’t have the right skills of what businesses are looking for. It is important to champion advocacy that ensures the coming together of minds between the government and all the agencies to ensure that they incorporate the right kind of industry training into the curriculum in schools so that when students graduate, they will be able to add value to organisations.

“We have human resources, we should be able to convert them to valuable talents,” she said.

Adedoyin Odunfa, CEO, Digital Jewels, said “there is the need to take capacity building seriously, be it in private or public sector,” saying that with the right learning and development strategies put in place, organisations and managers of government agencies would be better informed on the intelligent ways to deploy training to achieve their set goals.

Commenting on the efforts put in place to engage government and private organisations to key into learning and development, Odunfa maintains that the Government should get involve adding that one of the problems we have in Nigeria is lack of research and data. “We should stop being a generation that has lots of people and lots of under employed people” she said.