Beyond school certificate (BSC) syndrome

Being a young Nigerian who fully knows what young Nigerians especially graduates pass through in this country, the statistics are sobering, worrisome, disturbing and heart-rending. With the rule of thumb, Sixty per cent of Nigeria’s population is made up of the youth and youth unemployment in Nigeria is put at about 60 per cent invariably, this gives one an insight into the terrible circumstances in which young Nigerians have found themselves.

The plight of the average young Nigerian becomes all the more pathetic when one considers their virtual inability to renew their rents and to afford some basic necessities of life as posited by Abraham Maslow hierarchal needs. Concisely, the polity is mercilessly competitive and the environment extremely hostile for the average young Nigerian to start anything serious. The aftermath of unemployment has led to a societal menace, directly affecting through the fabrics of the entire Nigerian state.

Living without an adequate source of income makes life extremely frustrating. Individuals without jobs are most often opened to a wide spectrum of emotions, anger, sadness, confusion and stress causing a psychological breakdown. There are many paper graduates roaming the streets looking for jobs, conversely, some companies have also lamented that many Nigerian graduates are unemployable, so therefore who is telling the truth? Are there Jobs but no employable graduates?

Or that there are not so many jobs out there? One can easily infer that there are more employable graduates than the available jobs. It is true that many employers are fond of saying that many graduates are unemployable, the truth they are shying away from is that they are not willing to invest in a system that works but are looking for a ‘Messiah’ graduate who will triple their turn-over within few months of employment. If there is a good system in place in a company, an average Nigerian graduate will function effectively.

Surprisingly, some Nigerian banks have good systems and that is why a graduate of Yoruba will fit in well at the foundational level while he climbs the ladder. Most times, the class of degree doesn’t reflect in effectiveness wherever there is a working system, this therefore should send a strong signal to company owners about the need to concentrate on building a proper system instead of waiting for an employable genius.

There are a lot of social issues and problems are being recorded in our society. Unfortunately, the inability to secure a dream job is one of the biggest misfortunes amidst the citizens, hence a snowball in unemployment rate. In this part of the world, we are made to understand that acquiring a tertiary school certificate is a guarantee to being employed in order to earn a living, that notwithstanding, there are a lot of unemployed youth despite having the said paper certificate with “honours”, unfortunately.

The question now is; does a school certificate guarantee one being employed? Many people do not know that there are lots of people without school certificate in offices today; the argument is not that school certificate is not important; it’s just a matter of directing you to look beyond your school certificate. The fundamental discrepancy in our education system has brought about this situation of unemployment.

It is often argued that the educational curriculum has failed to prepare the youth for the dynamic market in the economic setting. The lack of marketable, soft and employability skills in youth makes it harder for them to find decent employment. Most youths are basking in the euphoria of the B.sc attained not knowing that it means “beyond the school certificate” and not the widely acclaimed notion it bears.

Most people go to university to graduate with degrees that would qualify them for office jobs, where they would shuffle papers without thinking for the rest of their working lives. Meanwhile, most companies want people who are creative with high level of intelligentsia, problem solvers etc. Not clerks or clerical workers as the case may be, well of course, when some individuals turn up looking for job and cannot show that he or she is filled with creative and innovative ideas, then reverse is the case. Sadly, our universities do not teach one how to be a problem solver.

The problem is our educational system does not teach students to think, they teach students to just regurgitate what they’ve been taught; the la cram, la pour syndrome”, most Nigerian students think that learning is only limited to class activities, but with the emerging trends, No it’s not because learning is continuum, it cuts across different areas.

Did you spend years studying to get a certificate with the sole purpose of securing a job for yourself; for the purpose of being educated; or to become an overall success? Don’t allow your school certificates limit your full potentials, there is a lot you can do without a certificate and there are so many more things you are enabled to do with your certificate. “Becoming successful and fulfilling a purpose is beyond having a school certificate.”

You can study a particular course and become successful doing something different, don’t limit yourself to a field all in the course of holding a certificate. It’s good to have a vision for what you want and work towards achieving it, then combine hard work with smartness. As an undergraduate or a jambite who do not intend to thread entrepreneurial path, the journey to secure a job after graduation begins right from secondary school or at worst from the day he gets admission into a university.

The problem with most there-are-no-jobs singers is because, among others, they leave it too late. They don’t do what they ought to do when they ought to do it. The street is already filled with unemployed graduates. To get employed, you need to do something different from others; you can be all you desire with or without a certificate, only if the right steps are taken. So stand up tall to your dreams and fulfill your purpose of becoming successful.

Alao Abiodun Joshua writes from the University of Ibadan. He’s a writer, campus journalist and social commentator. He can be reached via [email protected]