Handy skills create buffers against economic uncertainties

The National Bureau of Statistics puts the ratio of unemployed young Nigerians at 49.5 percent as at June, 2016. When compared to the number a year ago, the harsh realities facing the 21st century millennial is one of a quarter of a life spent studying with no guarantee of a worthwhile job in the end. There is also another angle to the unemployment dilemma. With the rising unemployment rates in the country, microbiologists are working in law firms while engineers are serving as customer service personnel for various companies. Talk about a weirdly wired workforce. I had a time lapse of about 7 months after youth service prior to getting my first job, which was of course outside my ‘area of expertise’. I wasn’t one to stay at home waiting for a job to come and not do anything. So while I sent out resumes hoping for the “milk factory’’ job that most young people dream of having when they leave school, I sought to learn a skill – tailoring. I love fashion. So this was in line with my passion and core interests. I had a file full of cloth sketches that my friends and family will look at in awe and wonder why I wasn’t creating them yet. Just fresh from service, I had little money to pay for an apprenticeship and had to seek help from my family. I registered for an apprenticeship with a Ghanaian tailor in my neighbourhood, who makes amazing clothes and every day I would do my house chores and spend the rest of my day at the tailor’s learning and soaking in every bit of information he had to give. However, there were a few loopholes. I had initially wanted to register at a proper fashion school with a curriculum and specific time frame. The organisation and structure I knew would help me learn fast and clearly, all I needed to bring my sketches into life. But at that time, I couldn’t find any of such facilities in Enugu. And that was my major challenge as an apprentice.

The training was informal and not wholistic. Trainings were not structured and you literarily had to pull out information from the tailor often. Sometimes, he was swamped with work and I became a second wheel, helping finish clients’ dresses and learning little or nothing of the core sections of dress making that I had set out to learn. A job finally came and I had to end the apprenticeship and go off to start a 9-5 that took up all my time and energy. I had no time or materials to practice all I had learnt and time flew by quickly. A year or so into my first job, Nigeria officially hit a recession and friends and colleagues were losing jobs in the blink of an eye. This was my wake-up call. I could not rely on a job to bring me the financial freedom I longed for or the fulfilment I desired in life. My skills thus came in handy. I purchased a sewing machine and began brushing up my now rusty skills in tailoring. It’s been only a few weeks down the line and I have about 5 clients already. There are a lot of challenges facing startup companies in Nigeria however I believe as resilient as we have become, they are issues that can  be worked around. How about starting in your home and building up to owning an office space? How about doing most of the core work yourself and employing the help of family members when necessary? One of my friends who own a fashion label had her sister helping her weave the made dresses till she was able to buy her own weaving machine, and so much more. In today’s economy, a regular 9-5 is no longer enough. With the increase in drive for profitability and the desire to cut costs as much as is possible, most jobs are still on the line. I have a lot of examples of colleagues who were laid off and had nothing to fall back on. A lot of them took that as an opportunity to acquire makeup trainings, tailoring trainings and one or two are currently masters of their own businesses. While we should always encourage academic excellence in children and young people, helping them develop handy skills is very vital to how resilient they become to the ever changing dynamics of the nation’s economy.