Osaretin Victor Asemota@asemota
I should update my older thread on this topic. Talent was always going to be the battleground, and I said this a couple of years ago. You have to build a pipeline that adapts to your needs, rather than fighting in the same market as the rest of the world and complaining when people make optimal choices.
Doing it this way is costly and brutal. Citibank, Nigerian Breweries, and Shell discovered this talent quality problem as far back as the 90s and decided to build a process to take “average people” and turn them world-class.
This process in Nigeria and Africa has focused mainly on coding with Andela and others when coding skills were in high demand globally, but AI changed everything. Demand is still there but it shifted gears.
Coding skills are NOT everything a startup needs. In Nigeria, we lack experienced operators in many areas because there aren't many places for them to learn. One of the things people fail to realize about Japa is that it provides learning and advancement opportunities. You need to create learning opportunities for people as an investment.
This has always been my problem with the so-called “tech investment” in Africa. People are funding the output of a broken pipeline rather than investing in fixing it. They invested in companies skimming from the top rather than building from the bottom up. Google and others did a lot better from the bottom in Africa.
We need company academies again and partnership with educational institutions. I was able to do my undergrad project research because of a lab in UNIBEN partly funded by Shell. This current model we have is unsustainable.
I will write more. This is just a rant.
