The ant-hills are not built by the elephants but by the collective efforts of the little ants. The triumphs of 2024 will not come because of our  individual efforts; it will take a team, a village, a community, and a nation to ascend.

We have learnt in the past that the strongest among us is limited by the weakest in our midst. From most Nigerian experts, 2024 has many attributes to repeat the 2023 economic vagaries of high inflation, deterioration of currency, loss in manufacturing productivity, high cost of energy, and broad economic stasis.

But I tell you something: we as a people can reverse those challenges and deliver abundance for all.  It comes down to what we can do for our communities, states and the nation.

A recent report from Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) noted that 27 states in Nigeria attracted $0 foreign investments for the first nine months of 2023. These are the states:

1. Bauchi
2. Bayelsa
3. Benue
4. Borno
5. Cross River
6. Delta
7. Ebonyi
8. Edo
9. Enugu
10. Gombe
11. Imo
12. Jigawa
13. Kaduna
14. Kano
15. Katsina
16. Kebbi
17. Kogi
18. Kwara
19. Nasarawa
20. Osun
21. Oyo
22. Plateau
23. Rivers
24. Sokoto
25. Taraba
26. Yobe
27. Zamfara

You may wonder how such could be possible since these states have ministries and departments focusing on investments. Does it mean no one tried or they just hired highly unqualified people with no impacts?

Good People, while we always look at the governors, it goes beyond them to the team, and that means every person must do his or her job. Imagine if those governors clean houses today, and bring in some motivated people from our local banks, etc to support the states. It is troubling that 27 states out of 36 states recorded $0 when the message everywhere is how to attract foreign investments into Nigeria. That must change.

(Meanwhile, I thank my state of Abia for attracting $150 million in Q3 alone; the year 2024 will be better).

Every year, I take time to check the pulse of the IT  career market. Yes, what companies are looking for as they hire entry level engineers and tech workers. For 2024, I am using three words from a recent IBM recruitment message as the summary: curiosity, individuality and possibility.

In a recent recruitment flyer, IBM wrote, “Are you an IT or Computer Science graduate, ready to lead in this new era of technology and solve some of the world’s most challenging problems? Then apply for the IBM Graduate Programme and join IBM as a graduate trainee…. “ IBM summarized what they needed around those three words.

Looking at the three words, the second one – individuality – is noticeable. Notice that being good as an individual is now highly valued because increasingly AI is now our team members at work. In other words, if you have a lot of team members as AIs, the challenge now is how you will bring the specific and individual human element into the team. 

Sure, this is not to say that Teamwork is not important, but the message is clear: what you can deliver in a team of AIs is as valuable as what you can deliver as a team member in a world of humans.

That also underscores my point that the career of the future is not just prompt engineering  – helping machines understand humans – but how to help humans understand machines better, because overtime the machines will evolve!

Be curious, deepen your individual capacities and unlock possibilities. Happy New Year.

According to ChatGPT “…Prompt engineering is the process of designing effective and efficient prompts for generating high-quality responses from natural language processing models such as GPT-3. It involves the selection and combination of various text inputs that can help guide the model to produce specific outputs.

Prompt engineering requires a deep understanding of the underlying language model and the task at hand, as well as the ability to create prompts that are tailored to the specific needs of the user or application. The goal is to design prompts that provide sufficient context and direction to the model, while avoiding ambiguity or confusion that could result in incorrect or irrelevant responses.

Effective prompt engineering can significantly improve the accuracy and usefulness of natural language processing models, and is a critical component of many AI applications such as chatbots, language translation, and content generation…”