What Job Seekers Must Do Before Applying For Jobs in Nigeria

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July 17, 2019

By Mutiu Iyanda

We do not need to hire a microscope from the United States of America or the United Kingdom to know that the unemployment rate has been alarming in the last five years. We equally do not need to hire business experts from other countries before realising that businesses are struggling to survive and attract the right candidates for various positions due to the dwindling education standard and absence of complete skills set needed for different roles and tasks.

But job seekers would have to blame themselves if they continue finding it difficult to get their desired jobs as businesses innovate and increase their capabilities towards improved solutions delivery and mitigating the micro and macro challenges from economic and political funnels.

It is annoying that despite the staggering unemployment rate in the previous years and possible increase by 2020, Nigerian job seekers are failing to realise that their personal features and values must align with the businesses’ purposes and values. Instead of harmonizing their resources towards understanding companies and curriculum vitae development, they appropriated the resources dominantly for comprehending jobs and recruitment processes in Q1 and Q2, 2019, analysis reveals.

For instance, in Q1 2019, NNPC, Nigeria Police, Dangote, Nigeria Customs Service, Nigeria Prison Service, NAFDAC, FRSC, Nigeria Immigration and Flour Mill were the main establishments they sought knowledge about, basically to understand the nature of vacancies and requirements. This also applies to Q2 2019, when NNPC, WAEC, Nigeria Customs Service, Nigeria Prison Service, Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company and Delta State’s Teachers Recruitment were the most searched organisations for possible job placements.

Source: Google Trends, Infoprations Analysis, 2019

Navigate the Market: The Place of PPPT Framework

To navigate the market and survive the storms occasioned by the lack of small and large scale businesses to absorb a significant number of the graduates, the sellers (graduates) need to “SWOTise” [strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats] themselves along with PPPT framework. PPPT entails process, product, people and technology. At process, fresh graduates and job seekers need to devise means through which the needed jobs could be got. The first stage within the process is to be a qualified person.

By virtue of being a University or other higher institution graduates, this stage is accomplished. Beyond this, job seekers must be able to develop appropriate and valuable curriculum vitae that will attract buyers (in this case, HR person acting for the business owners or the owners themselves). Within the process, people must assist job seekers. They could be teachers, mentors, friends and colleagues. The assistance must have been got while in school and during the course of developing disruptive CV.

Having disruptive CV is a matter of doing a SWOT analysis before writing and applying for a job. Doing a SWOT analysis will assist the job seekers in understanding how they fit with the buyers’ business environment because the environment is being competitive every day. The tool –SWOT has been used and still being applied by businesses to pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to their process, product, people and technologies. This explains why SWOT is important in CV writing.

When businesses want to understand their environment, they identify specific internal prowess, capabilities and competencies with the intent of capitalizing on them while executing or delivering promised values to the clients. Efforts are made by the employees at corporate, business and functional levels to mitigate weaknesses and threats to the business profitability and sustainability. The end result of SWOTIZING by any business is to know how to improve the PPPT. When it is obvious that new hands (employees) need to be added to enhance, process, product and technology, human resources department swings into action by calling for application from prospective employees.

Such employees must also adopt the tool while writing their tailored job vacancy requirements as explained earlier. Job seekers should see themselves as products expected to add value to the buyers’ process, product and technologies being threatened by external forces capable of reducing profits and ending the business’ life. Job seekers’ strengths and opportunities must align with the buyers’ SO as explained in job description, roles or responsibilities, skills and competencies.

It’s important because knowing the negatives and positives remain appropriate means of making the right decisions. When the negatives outweigh the positives for a particular job, the ideal is not to apply for such job. From experience, the CV of such person would not be attended to because the negatives must have established that the person failed to meet the job description, job roles or functions, skills and competency tests of the buyer (employer), which further established that the candidate would not be a perfect person to solve the identified weaknesses and threats.

Weighing and Making Smart Decision

Source: Infoprations Analysis, 2019

In our model, job seekers must be sincere while evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in line with the buyers’ own. The strengths and opportunities could be recorded using +5 or +10. The same approach applies to weaknesses and threats, but it must be in negative form.

The score for each strength, weakness, opportunity and threat must be added to have cumulative score that point out the direction of the decision that should be taken. SO belongs to positive polarity while WT belongs to negative polarity, according to our analysis. With this, it is easier for the job seekers to decide whether to apply for a job or not.

Why Email Marketing Is Important for Your Small Business Growth

By

Oladoyin Idris

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July 17, 2019

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Email marketing channel is a marketing system that allows businesses the means of reaching out to their prospective and existing customers through promotional messages. It’s widely regarded as a cost-effective means of generating leads, improving product sales, building brand awareness, and fostering loyalty with customers. With billions of users, have it mind that email isn’t going anywhere.

Email marketing channel allows you to share messages through email channel. There are many reasons email marketing works effectively. Email can be customized for your customers “Call To Action”, request feedback from your customers, and lots more.

If you’re operating a business, email remains the best way in reaching out to your targeted market globally. Let’s look at it this way. Do you know any literate person that doesn’t have an email address in our contemporary world? So few. It buttresses the point why email has vital impact in our lives, one way or the other.

Compared with other existing marketing channels today, in reaching out to targeted audience, email remains the best channel for winning over your prospect’s attention, and as well as engaging their emotions. Simply, with email marketing, you can improve your revenue. Till date, email marketing remains the most successful marketing channel for building strong clients relationships.

The pros of email marketing

Permission-based: The bright side of email marketing is that it gives you the benefits of having your marketing list made up of those who truly desired often emails in their inbox. Users who are really interested in your businesses are more likely to connect with you easily.

It has Flexible design structure – you’ll be able to send graphics, text, and attach as many files as needed – depending on what suits your business. The design flexibility features offers you the scope in conveying your message to your targeted market.

It highly scalable – email marketing is a tool used in reaching hundred of audience and millions of targeted users.

Sub-division and personalization – email marketing allows you to personalize your messages as needed. Also, you will be able build your marketing list, by doing this; will allow customers receive prompt messages from you, and making those interested in what you have to opt-in for your products/services.

It is measurable – you will be able give self appraisal on your email’s campaign success through web analytics programs. You’d test different copies, designs, subject lines to see which is most useful among them easily making you to optimize your future emails campaigns greatly.

Improved sales – Making high sales can be likened to email marketing campaign; nowadays, customers get their product through call-to-action. For instance, you can sway your prospect to purchase your product over your competitors thereby giving you more sales.

Cons of email marketing include

Spam – ‘spam’ or commercial email infuriates customers. It makes things worse if your email is not reaching the right market list; the email users may unsubscribe or delete your email lists. Hence, you should comply with the rules and regulation and never to infringe on user’s privacy

Undelivered emails – Unreached emails may be delivered to your target users if you don’t make use of certain keywords in the content of your email, hence, will get filtered out by email internet service providers and email software.

File Size – Your email content needs to be small enough to be easily get downloaded by your end users. This is because email containing lots of images may take long to load hence losing interest of your audience.

Resources and technical know-how – In having a successful email campaign, make sure you have the right content, design and user’s marketing lists. If you think you’re not up for it, be ready to outsource it to freelancers of this niche.

Some popular brands that offer email marketing

SWIVELTECH: Swivel Technologies end-to-end email solutions helps you grow your email list and activate the potential customers within it. They makes use of email marketing to grow businesses.
CKDIGITAL: It’s a digital marketing company aimed at generating leads for brands through email and newsletter.
LYFE MARKETING: It is an email marketing agency that helps speed up sales cycle. They are also involved in moving prospects from one stage of sales funnel to the next.

Thanks for reading!

Nigeria’s Small Business Burden: Making Empowerment Schemes Yield Long Term Results

By

Kalu Ndukwe

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July 17, 2019

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By Kalu Ndukwe

Small businesses play a huge role in socio-economic development of a country. They create employment opportunities for lots of citizens. In this regard, beside entrepreneurs whose inherent passion is simply to be self employed, many other individuals who would have been rather unemployed due to shortage of job opportunities for the teeming population, become productively engaged.

It is the inherent high potential of small businesses to facilitating reduction of unemployment, crime and the potential of growth, which will further create more jobs that makes governments to initiate various empowerment schemes that are aimed at providing leverage for the starting and running of small businesses.

Classical Empowerment solutions

Some of the well known means through which empowerment programs have been implemented include:

Training of individuals on relevant technical skills
Start up capital grant
Provision of motor vehicle, Tricycles and motorcycles, through loan scheme
Provision of sewing machine, wheelbarrows, grinding machines.

The Real Challenge

Why it doesn’t really make economic sense to purport to have solved a problem today only for the problem to comeback tomorrow, it is very important to reexamine the real reasons for the implementation of empowerment of citizens to start their own businesses, so that efforts to achieve the objective(s), will assume a wholistic approach.

Empowerment programs assume rightly that the most serious challenges facing small business operators and unemployed youths are skill and funding related, hence the intervention in the area of training on relevant business skills, provision of start up funds and or equipment(s). It’s reasonable to suggest that the intention is for the business to thrive and grow. Otherwise, the whole exercise would have become a fruitless spending of taxpayers money.

But the obvious reality is that skill and funding (regardless of the nature of the funding), alone, in view of present realities, are rightly also, no longer sufficient catalyst for growth of small firms, due to the peculiar reason that the leveraging power of the above empowerment schemes, would have sufficiently been choked by growing level of infrastructural decay in power and road subsectors, with the attendant problems of exponentially increasing operation cost which can lead to suffocating of growth and even drowning of as many small businesses as possible.

Boniface, a shoemaker, poses for a photograph with a set of finished women’s shoes at a shoe factory in Araria market in Aba, Nigeria August 19, 2016. REUTERS/Afolabi Sotunde

A Specific Example for Clarification

A friend who started a fashion business, narrated, during a discussion, his battle to grow his business. The technical aspects of the challenge narrated is basically operation cost. To provide a clear picture: the most significant factors that have the lion share in growing his operation cost are traveling and power generation. With respect to travel expenses, the nature of the business involves traveling three times a week. Initially traveling cost of the business was averaging at 80,640 NGN per year for locations that it takes 30 minutes to one hour to reach. It currently averages at 216,000 NGN per year, for traveling thrice a week to those same locations which now consume upward of one hour thirty minutes to two hours. That’s about 168% rise in traveling cost excluding cost of additional time spent.

Why inflation has played a role in increasing the traveling expenses, two factors have contributed more to the rise. First is bad road and next is the inevitable option that to reach some of those places, one must take a bike to cross areas of roads that are presently impassable for motor vehicles, and then enter another vehicle after crossing those areas.

The next is powering of the business office which cost presently 420,480 NGN from the previous amount of 250,560 NGN per year excluding NEPA bill. (Well, it’s not forgotten that, at least, that name has changed). That’s actually 68% rise resulting from increase in cost of fuel. This sort of cost rise is not very helpful for a small firm whose average sales revenue growth for the period being considered, is just 33.333% to be at 2,880,000 NGN, that is, two million eight hundred and eighty thousand naira, per year. Especially, when it is viewed that cost of the products sold, rent and other important cost items have not been considered.

The Way Forward

Private initiative has a lot of role to play in driving creative reforms that reduces operation cost for small businesses. For instance, there’s this initiative in which the owners of businesses in a certain cluster decided to jointly acquire a heavy duty power generating set. The set operates 12 business hours a day. And each user pays 300NGN for each day the light is used. The obvious limitation in this sort of arrangement, is that, it is only appropriate for cluster of individuals whose operation does not involve use of heavy equipments. Otherwise, fashion designers, shop owners etc that may be favored by such arrangement, has no reason for not exploring that initiative.

The average cost of using personal small generator for 12 hours a day is not less than the amount stated previously above. Whereas, the reason the above scheme is favored among the pioneers of the initiative is because each user now spends just 86,400 NGN a year for using uninterrupted power for 12 hours a day, six days in a week, throughout the year. That’s equivalent to a cost savings of 334,080 NGN per year. Something of this nature is a sure-win short term solution, besides the drastic reduction in noise and air pollution that often follow the clustering of small power generator sets in small business areas.

Finally, it is emphasized that It doesn’t really make economic sense to purport to have solved a problem today only for the problem to comeback tomorrow. Free technical training and funding alone will not largely yield the expected results without business friendly environment. Good roads and electricity are very important enablers of small business survival and growth. Small businesses do not have the strong mechanism for coping with huge shock resulting from poor infrastructures. It’s in the best interest of the country, for the sake of the above reasons and many others, for more seriousness to be shown in improving power generation and changing the faces of our roads.

The Lagos Challenge

By

Orji Obinna

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July 17, 2019

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By Orji Obinna

As at 2016, the GDP (gross domestic product) of Lagos State stood at about $90 billion. The 2018 GDP was projected (actual data not available) around $136 billion which makes Lagos the 5th largest economy in Africa. In terms of GDP, only Algeria, Egypt and South Africa and Nigeria are ahead of Lagos State which makes it all the more interesting. With a population projected to be excess of 23 million people, it has the required human resources to function effectively as a country.

So then the big question is, “How ambitious should Lagos State be”?

My answer to that question would be dam for flood control and hydro-power.

Lagos should start thinking and functioning as an independent state by providing its own power supply. A Coastal city with eroding shorelines should at least take full advantage of the biggest threat they face, which is flooding. Put dams on the rivers and coastline. This city is one of the few cities in the world that has enough free water to power itself and also excess to supply neighboring states. The incessant cases of flooding in the islands, apart from highlighting the drainage challenge, are pointers to that the city needs a dam.

Probably not just one but as many as they are willing to build considering that by projection they have sufficient resources to execute them. The dam will first of all prevent the coastal waters from reaching the islands there, by preventing flooding when the flood waters come rushing in, and then they will also provide hydroelectricity. This is the single most important project that can enable Lagos make that giant leap into the future.

It will have a domino effect on economic activities which will be propagated across other sectors. This is the greatest enabling environment that can make Lagos strive to be with, if not join, the likes of Beijing, New York, Manila, Tokyo, and Abu Dhabi as the great cities of the future. This form of energy is renewable.

Yes, dams affect the ecosystem in so many unpleasant ways by displacing marine life and distorting their natural habitats. Experts can argue for and against that but that isn’t the purpose of this article. Sure, just as with every other project, an environmental impact assessment (EIA) should be carried out to figure out just how much of the environment will be sacrificed for this.

But for Lagos to thrive, it needs dams to control flood, and then provide hydro-power. Following dam project will be intra-state railway line. The question is why not? Smaller economies are doing it: Ghana, Kenya, Angola and many others. In effect what I am saying is this, dream big Lagos, dream big!

What we loved about Tecno HiOS 5.0 Features

By

Ajayi Bode

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July 17, 2019

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If you are yet to hear about Tecno’s HiOS 5.0 then you may need to punch yourself in the face. Why, you may ask. That is because Tecno recently unveiled the latest version of its popular custom Android ROM, the HiOS 5.0, the brilliant next-gen operating system (OS) developed by Tecno Mobile as the skin for its customized version of the Android 9.0 Pie to much applause.

In terms of features, HiOS 5.0 offers a premium user experience that is underpinned by an intuitive interface complete with exciting AI abilities that makes it smarter and streamlined than ever. If the name of the powerful AI engine, Einstein, doesn’t already gives you a glimpse into what to expect then know that the new HiOS 5.0 is super smart and has consolidated many of the settings to minimize the number of steps you need to go through to get things done. Overall, HiOS 5.0 is lighter and faster than its predecessors with unbelievable app launch speeds and virtual assistant which enables you to optimize your smartphone usage to new and exciting levels.

So, if you are a Tecno fan and want to know what the company has in store for you, here are the 10 best HiOS 5.0 features that you should know:

RECHARGE KING

An overarching feature of the HiOS 5.0 is its ability to simplify things for users and there is no better example of this than the Recharge King which is certainly the fastest airtime recharge tool currently available for mobile phones. Just as the name implies, the Recharge King gives you the ability to top up airtime on your device in a fast and convenient way by simply scanning the recharge pin. To use the Recharge King simply select the network provide and scan the recharge pin number. That all. Say goodbye to having to remember endless network recharge code and typing long, pesky recharge pins.

DATA SWITCHER

One of the newest and most exciting things to come to HiOS 5.0 is the Data Switcher which allows you to juggle between SIM cards in the quick setting menu. Like many contemporary smartphone users you probably have more than one SIM card and have been faced with that puzzle of having to dig into your settings every time you want to change your data connection or SIM in use. With the HiOS 5.0, you can easily skip this and switch the SIM card you want to use for data connections with the minimal amount of fuss. The new OS enables you switch your SIMs in just one click. Switching SIMs doesn’t have to be painful anymore.

AI VIDEO BEAUTY

Another game winning feature of the HiOS 5.0 is the AI Video Beauty which hands down helps you take the best selfies and videos anywhere. With the AI Beauty, HiOS 5.0 has clearly won the race to fix the issue of getting the perfect look during video calls. Most of the time, when we make a video call, the video reaching the other end has been compressed adversely affecting the quality of video. Now Tecno fans can rest easy, with the new AI Video Beauty feature of the HiOS 5.0, you can enjoy video chats naturally without makeup the new OS will make you shine in your video call chats, looking younger, brighter and fresher.

FINGERPRINT PASSWORD RESET

The HiOS 5.0 comes preloaded with a fingerprint password reset option which is good if like a lot of people you find it hard to remember passwords. In the unfortunate event where you forget the password or PIN of your Tecno phone, you will now have the option to reset it using your fingerprint. Reset your passwords in less than 20 seconds.

INTELLIGENT NOTIFICATION MANAGEMENT

The Intelligent Notification Management feature helps you manage the notifications you would like to see and the ones you don’t. The new HiOS 5.0 uses AI technology to know exactly what notifications you don’t want to see often and stack them away for you without you having to go through the stress of doing it yourself. No need to swipe left. The intelligent notification management in HiOS 5.0 recognizes the irrelevant notifications and allows you focus on the real deal.

SMART PHOTO CLEAN UP

Smartphones have become important tools in documenting precious memories with friends and family in form of photos. This means that a lot of pictures will be taken with some of them unwanted either because they are overexposed, dark, blurry or identical. HiOS 5.0 gives you the ability to categorize photos into dark, blurry and similar pics and free up space with the press of a button while leaving the good ones.

AI READING MODE

The HiOS 5.0 gives you helps convert your smartphone to an e-book with just a toggle. While this feature has been around for a bit, the Einstein AI engine makes it smarter than ever. When the feature is turned on, the device auto adjust to your environment by adjusting the screen brightness and colors, making it more comfortable to your eyes, especially at night.

SMART PANEL

This is one of the juicy new features of new HiOS 5.0, a Smart Panel which has all your favorite and frequently-used features and localization services. You can access the smart panel from any screen no matter the app you are currently using. You can take a selfie from a smart panel within just 2 steps enabling you to capture all the beautiful moments. You can chat, play your favourite games or even visit your favorite websites through the Smart Panel. Do you have some favorite apps you use often? The Smart Panel gives you an extremely quick and very easy way to get to some of your most used features or tools and apps on an Tecno Smart Phone all in a few taps.

BIKE MODE

You’ve heard about Flight mode, welcome to the era of Bike mode! Bike mode is an innovative feature of the #HiOS 5.0 that ensures your safety during bike rides. If you find yourself having to frequently check your phone while riding a bike, mistaking unimportant notifications for urgent calls then you need not worry because with Bike mode enabled you will not be bothered by frequent calls and notifications while you are on a bike ride. So if you are on a bike ride, whether driving or as a passenger, whenever someone calls you during the duration of ride, Bike mode can automatically reject the incoming call by sending a polite message giving you a safer and joyful riding experience.

What Job Seekers Must Do Before Applying For Jobs in Nigeria