The Future of Work: Exploring Pathways to Careers in the Digital Age — an AfricaNXT Panel by Skillup Africa

On Monday the 28th of February Skillup Africa hosted a panel at the 2022 edition of AfricaNXT titled The Future of Work: Exploring Pathways to Careers in the Digital Age, which I had the pleasure to moderate.

My distinguished panel consisted of experts that have dedicated their careers to ecosystem and human capacity building —  Nkem Nweke, Program Manager at Microsoft ADC, Joseph Agunbiade, Co-Founder Skillup Africa, Tosin Faniro-Dada, MD & CEO at Endeavor Nigeria and Ugochukwu Nwosu, Co-Founder The Growth Practice.

These awesome humans and nation builders engaged in a robust discussion on the topic that focused on:

• Fostering Sustainable Talent Development
• Opportunities and Career Paths in Tech

I will share more on what the key take aways are, but let’s first explore the reason why this topic is so important.

Panelists at AfricaNXT: L to R: Ugochukwu Nwosu, Co-Founder The Growth Practice, Tosin Faniro-Dada, MD & CEO at Endeavor Nigeria, Nkem Nweke, Program Manager at Microsoft ADC, Nkemdilim Uwaje Begho Co-Founder Skillup Africa and Joseph Agunbiade, Co-Founder Skillup Africa,

The Talent War is just beginning….

According to US-based management consulting firm Korn Ferry, by 2030 there will be a global shortage of more than 85 million tech workers, representing $8.5 trillion in lost annual revenue. The research further shows that the United States and Russia are expected to be short of 6 million workers each, while China could face a deficit of 12 million workers.

Other economies expected to be hit hardest are Brazil, Indonesia, and Japan, facing shortages of up to 18 million workers apiece.

This shortage is expected to become more acute in the coming years as technology continues to play a pivotal role across industries and every aspect of business.

How the Talent War is affecting Africa

The continent will not be left out of this talent shortage, unless we actively work towards finding and implementing sustainable models that address the deficit in supply and help accelerate talent development across the value chain.

According to The Africa Developer Ecosystem 2021 report by Google & Accenture the pool of professional developers increased by 3.8% YoY in 2021 whereby Nigeria contributed 5,000 new developers into the now 716k+ strong pool of developers across the continent.

The majority of Africa developers (almost 50%) are Junior Developers with 0–3 years of experience. These junior developers often face challenges in transitioning to becoming mid level developers due to the lack of junior roles or graduate trainee schemes that could help them hone their skills.

However according to the same report African Developers with more than 3 years of experience are gaining traction with international companies and are either relocating or working remotely.

African startups, that currently hire more than half of Africa’s developer population, raised over $4BN in 2021, which will allow them to scale, thus further increasing the demand for local developers.

Can you see the talent war upon us?

The time to invest into the talent value chain is NOW….the time for young people to explore opportunities in the tech ecosystem is NOW!

Let’s dive into the discussion:

The following gives a detailed overview of the two key areas that the panel discussion was focused on:

1. Fostering Sustainable Talent Development

Exploring opportunities across sectors and industries in the Digital Age

Nkem Nweke, Program Manager at the Microsoft Africa Development Centre (ADC) shared that the ADC is focused on scaling the engineering capacity (number of developers) in Africa to ensure that they can build solutions created by Africans for Africans right here in the heart of Lagos.

In line with these ambitions, Microsoft is looking to train and hire 500 Engineers within the West Africa Engineering Team in 2022. These engineers will be focused on working on existing Microsoft solutions, such as Microsoft Mesh, which was built by the Nigerian Engineering Team and is globally used.

Nkem assured the audience that Microsoft is dedicated to investing into talent not just for their own use, but also for the ecosystem and is actively working on strategic partnerships to improve the quality of engineers / developers on the continent and ensure well rounded talent.

Increasing the overall African engineering talent will ensure that there is sufficient talent available to allow startups to build solutions faster and scale faster.

Building a Sustainable Tech Talent Value Chain

Ugochukwu Nwosu, Co-Founder The Growth Practice explained that Talent Development requires a sustainable and long-term focused as well as community based approach that focuses on a partnerships, collaboration and stakeholder engagement across the value chain.

This means understanding the value chain and all the stakeholders within the value chain to ensure a good balance between supply and demand of high quality talent, which requires availability of talent development programs, financing to improve access to these programs, off-takers and opportunities for junior talent, as well as policies that support and incentivise talent development.

Tosin Faniro-Dada, MD & CEO at Endeavor Nigeria talked about her passion for supporting entrepreneurs and helping them scale, not just for the immediate impact this has on their organization, but more for the multiplier effect this confers on the larger society and economy.

She talked about talent being critical to achieving this mission and further echoed Ugo’s perspective with regards to partnerships and advised that talent development focused organisations need to engage with Startup Founders to ensure that there is an alignment between the talent that comes out of the pipeline and the talent these Founders are seeking, else Founders will continue to look elsewhere for quality talent.

Tosin also spoke about the importance of Startups and well established companies to create opportunities for Junior Developers and talked about some initiatives that Endeavor Portfolio companies have set up to improve the talent value chain as well as ensure a good balance of women in the ecosystem.

2. Opportunities and Career Paths in Tech:

Career Paths:

Furthermore, Tosin talked about the fact that there are many technical and non-technical career paths in tech, which are open to young people and will continue to evolve as technology evolves. She emphasised that there are a lot of opportunities to transition into the tech space without a technology background in roles such as strategy, business development, sales, marketing and project management.

Joseph Agunbiade, Co-Founder of Skillup Africa shared his career journey and the many hats he has worn starting out by volunteering to develop a website for his church and growing into a budding serial entrepreneur that has (co-)founded BudgIT, Univelcity, GetMobile and Skillup Africa.

He spoke about the importance of gaining practical experience and building a portfolio and how sometimes it’s okay to work for free — to volunteer for projects, secure an internship or build things on your own, experiment and continuously grow — this approach helps young developers build their portfolio and opens doors to new opportunities and that job that they are looking to land.

He further chimed that character is important and that there is no training program that can shape your character, so it’s important for young Africans to focus on character, integrity, timeliness, trustworthiness, discipline and consistency as these contribute to the career success of a developer just as much as the critical technical knowledge.

When asked about why young Nigerians should stay in Nigeria / choose local opportunities over international opportunities Nkem said that we cannot stop people from leaving, but what is important for people who are looking to leave is to make sure that they have home in their hearts. There are many ways to give back and to contribute to sustainable talent and socio economic development, no matter where you are.

Tosin agreed and stated that international experience is very useful and can improve opportunities for those who are looking to come back and contribute towards building our continent.

The Role of Soft Skills

Joseph emphasised that Soft Skills are key and should be part of every tech training program to ensure that we create more rounded and career ready talent that can easily plug into the opportunities available.

Ugo echoed the need for soft skills and said that young Nigerians looking to venture into the technology space need to be agile and embrace learning and continuously develop their transferable skills.

Mentorship, Tools & Resources:

He added that young Nigerians should also leverage the power of mentorship — engaging with industry professionals directly or indirectly; reading what these experts are writing, following their work and their career paths, joining career talks etc.

There are now a greater number of channels to learn, this means that students have to be more intentional and selective about which channel will help them achieve their goals.

The panel echoed that beyond tools and resources an attitude of life long learning in both traditional and unconventional manners has been the secret to success for many of us who have grown in the tech ecosystem.

Access to Financing:

Joseph talked about Skillup Africa — a student loan platform we co-founded, focused on democratising access to technology and digital skills training by creating a connected and sustainable technology talent value chain. Skillup does this by creating a platform that connects the various players within the value chain.

• Training providers with potential trainees and funding.
• Lenders with young Africans who are looking to be trained and require loans
• Employers and recruiters with trained talent
• Trained talent with jobs & internships

The last 18 months at Skillup have been very interesting and we have been able to empower young people by providing access to finance to them.

We have however also seen that many young people have a bias against loans due to misperceptions and low financial literacy.

Tosin confirmed this as she had a similar experience during her time at LSETF and talked about the importance of sharing success stories and educating young people about the products that are available, as well as being transparent about the terms and conditions.

To learn more about how you can invest into your future by applying for a student loan that helps finance your tech training, please visit www.skillup.africa

Key Take aways:

I truly enjoyed the discourse and have the following key take aways:

The Talent war is in full swing: For anyone in doubt, just refer to the stats mentioned earlier, but the talent development ecosystem is not sleeping, which makes me very happy.

We must be intentional about investing in junior talent: If we don’t invest in creating opportunities (internships, jobs, further skill development and graduate trainee programs) for Junior Talent, we will never have a critical mass of Senior Talent.

Financing remains an issue: The biggest stumbling block to democratising talent development is access to financing options for young people who are ready to learn a tech skill. That being said the existing opportunities that are available often get turned down, thus the current viewpoint of many young Nigerians towards loans serves as a constraint to up skilling at scale. It’s time for a systematic mindset shift.

Community based partnerships are key: To ensure sustainability and the ability to accelerate talent development we must all pitch in. Sustainable talent development on the continent is going to take a village.

It takes more than just technical skills: Resources, Tools, Role models and Mentors are key, while soft skills and transferrable skills are just as important as the core technical skills.

And that’s my recap from AfricaNXT….I would love to hear your point of view with regards to sustainable tech talent development — leave me a comment below.