Jobberman, the single largest online training and job placement website, in a press conference yesterday, announced its plans to host Nigeria’s largest ever Virtual Career Fair, which will take place on Wednesday September 30th 2020. As part of its #Champions campaign, 250 potential employers from various sectors including digital, agriculture and creative, and 10,000 highly qualified candidates will come together under one virtual roof for this landmark must-attend event.

As unemployment and underemployment reaches an all time high in Nigeria at over 40% due to the pandemic, the search for jobs has become an overcrowded marketplace, with 18-35 year olds mostly impacted. The one day Virtual Career Fair will be centred on how to navigate the increasingly competitive job space and provide the necessary tools to get hired, with one-one interviews between candidates and employers and sessions such as CV Preparation masterclasses.

The online event is part of Jobberman’s mandate to use its soft skills training to place 3 million young Nigerians in dignified employment in the next 5 years. Jobberman is the only recruitment services platform in Nigeria that offers to train and place candidates in dignified employment. The ongoing online training program equips young people (18-35) with critical tools including business etiquette, emotional intelligence and more, to help them transition into their new roles and increase workplace productivity. The Virtual Career Fair is free to all candidates who have completed the online program and passed the end of course assessment test.

Companies mainly from agri-tech, digital and the creative sectors with operations in Lagos, Kano and Kaduna will be in attendance to showcase their brands and company cultures. Employers already listed on the Jobberman platform are able to sign-up for free for the groundbreaking event and are required to commit to hiring within three months of the fair.

According to Hilda Kragha, Managing Director of ROAM Africa Jobs, “The Virtual Career Fair perfectly encapsulates Jobberman’s commitment to alleviating the strains of unemployment and employability, by connecting thousands of qualified candidates to reputable employers, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As an innovative and technologically driven company, I am delighted that we were able to find a solution to this immediate and challenging issue, by creating this first ever virtual space of opportunity for both employer and candidate. We strongly encourage signing-up.”

With over a decade in the recruitment business, Jobberman is using its platform and network  to create democtratic and transparent opportunities that eliminates nepotism, enabling a more productive workforce.

Prospective employers and candidates can register to attend the Virtual Career Fair via www.jobberman.com/careerfair.

*This is from a Jobberman press release

Intel faces a tough future as Nvidia becomes the absolute category-king in the modern microprocessor business; Nvidia market cap is about $300 billion for Intel’s $209 billion. With ARM in the arms of Nvidia, there is a new order right now. Yes, Nvidia is acquiring one of the most important technology companies in the world right now for $40 billion. ARM which makes a spectacular Central Processing Unit (CPU) technology is largely the operating system of modern mobile computing. 

With Nvidia’s AI technology being armed by these CPUs, you have a new basis of competition in the market, with industry-shaping implications for players like Intel. As that happens, Softbank goes home with a “profit” of $8 billion. The Japanese company (there is nothing soft in its name with its fat bank account) bought ARM for $32 billion four years ago.

Uniting NVIDIA’s AI computing with the vast reach of Arm’s CPU, we will engage the giant AI opportunity ahead and advance computing from the cloud, smartphones, PCs, self-driving cars, robotics, 5G, and IoT.

NVIDIA will bring our world-leading AI technology to Arm’s ecosystem while expanding NVIDIA’s developer reach from 2 million to more than 15 million software programmers.

Our R&D scale will turbocharge Arm’s roadmap pace and accelerates data center, edge AI, and IoT opportunities.

Arm’s business model is brilliant. We will maintain its open-licensing model and customer neutrality, serving customers in any industry, across the world, and further expand Arm’s IP licensing portfolio with NVIDIA’s world-leading GPU and AI technology.

Read more here.

SoftBank Closes $40 Billion Deal to Sell ARM to Nvidia

ByteDance let us know today they would not be selling TikTok’s US operations to Microsoft. We are confident our proposal would have been good for TikTok’s users, while protecting national security interests. To do this, we would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards for security, privacy, online safety, and combatting disinformation, and we made these principles clear in our August statement. We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas.

In my Grand Playbook of Business and The Leading Business Models of the 21st Century lectures, I explained how innovators are redesigning the ordinances of markets. Konga seems to have cracked the code on how to run ecommerce ventures in Nigeria and Africa. Happy to share this video which was made for our members in Tekedia Mini-MBA; registration for the next edition has just started. I am happy to share with our public community. Read here for the context of this video.

Sim Shagaya is correct with this tweet but interestingly the Konga of today is totally different from the one he ran.  So, let us not extrapolate that the old Konga could have gotten to this evolving destination.  The Konga which I posited should be sold, then, is totally not what we have now. The current Konga runs on a hybrid model, taking advantage of many physical stores across Nigeria through the Zinox Group.

Those stores help reduce marginal cost and improve unit economics. So, it is key we do not muddle it up with assumption that ecommerce is suddenly becoming profitable because Konga is. The fact is this: today’s Konga is not a pure play ecommerce company. It is a hybrid physical business with a super-online order placement portal. Yes, it is NOT asset-light, and certainly pays many real estate bills.

LinkedIn Comment on Feed

Impressively delivered brilliant perspective. Well done and thank you Prof. I think businesses in Africa needs to learn two core business success skills; Innovation and Calculated risk taking. Taking a vivid view at e-commerce, the digital part of the whole model is just like 25-30%, which is absolutely useless if your supply chain and logistics network which takes the remainder is not well thought out. It still baffles me to see that Konga is just trying to make such transition.

My utmost respect for Coca-cola and Walmart in that wise. I think where they probably got carried away is the fact that the transactions happen online. But at the same time, I think it’s pretty obvious that you don’t get your goods delivered to customers via cloud. And as much as you are trying to create an extensive network, you should try to leverage to have a shared risk, most especially, through horizontal integration. You clearly can’t succinctly execute this by playing a one man show. It will crash.