Gaining work readiness & employable job skills

A few years ago, I joined a seminar by One Ayindaa called ENTERPRISE SATURDAY. The topic was HOW DO I MAKE MYSELF EMPLOYABLE THROUGH VALUE ADDITION? This followed the first Barcamp Ahanta in December 2019, which was a partnership between GhanaThink and One Ayindaa. As Justice Baidoo puts it, One Ayindaa is a movement of young men and women of Ahanta. This was a year after we at GhanaThink had organized Jobcamps in the 10 regional capitals, and after the National Youth Employment Convening, the #YouthDeyJob & #Youth4Work hashtags were born.

Here are a few key things around work readiness and job skills I shared - and now you have access to the same information.

Adaptability & Ability to Learn

Being able to adapt & fit into different environments, having an attitude of learning, ability to get up to speed to do different tasks and being smart are probably the most crucial things for one to be employable.

Lots of young people are taught to take instructions and come back with particular answers. The world of work is more fluid than that. There aren't always text book answers. Workers need to think on their feet. That means learning something new or better most of the time. So an employee must be willing to note they don't know everything and must be willing to learn to accomplish tasks.

Youth in school are not normally put in positions to solve problems or experience what they're learning a lot. The lack of practicality also holds young people back. A lot of young people are not exposed to work through internships and hardly get to work under bosses who enable them to build the learning habits. This must change on all levels.

Building Employable Skills

If you're a young graduate who has never worked in any institution as an intern, then you should get into an organization and be like an intern, where the focus is to learn how to work in teams, work under supervision, understand how organizations work and how you can fit, etc. Building the work experience and the ability to deliver, learning from good bosses, that's more important than how much your salary is at this st(age). Your ability to be employed is what would keep you in a job or career, to enable you get bigger salaries or opportunities in the future. Your learning would ensure you become a more successful entrepreneur in the future if you choose to do so

If you have done all that is right in building yourself, there would be opportunities. Unless you havent done all that is right.

If you did an attachment or internship somewhere while in school, there are opportunities there for you to be employed. Those you worked with can recommend you elsewhere. The way you found the earlier opportunity would guide you on finding other opportunities as well. If you came into an Internship and didnt show the attitude of learning and teamwork, and either acted like you knew everything without proving how your knowledge would bring better results or didnt contribute value to the organization, you likely would not be called back or recommended.

It's unlikely there are things only you can do though. It's more about skills you've built that you might be better at than others, and you can bring those skills to bear in work. I have worked for many employers - primarily amongst them are Google, and Rancard. I also worked at MIT and Stanford as students. Many students here can create work for themselves by asking to work with various departments for free, the key here is building soft skills and experience, and becoming more employable.

Building Value

The goal of organizations is mostly to make money. If you are unable to add value which drives revenue, money, brand, impact to make the business or organization successful, you're not likely to be employable.

There are lots of jobs that also want you to take instructions and deliver. You could be easily replaced in such jobs. Once you start to add value, make the job and organization better, that is not easily replaceable.

Job roles are not determined by employees, they are determined by employers. Many employers want to be sure their employees would add and provide value to the organization. So if they want the employee to start out as an intern, it's mostly to test that person before they get more responsibility and more pay.

CVs & Resumes
Unfortunately, there are lots of bad CVS that young people have and their colleagues copy the same bad type CVs from them. We need to solve this. We need to figure out what good CVs look like and copy those, instead. In your CV, you want to show how you added value to something you worked on, and not what you were asked to do. Instead of showing your job description, show what you did to achieve results and tell us what the results are.

Instead of - Take notes - say - Took notes for weekly meetings and monitored tasks on a monthly basis.

In showing results, you talk about numbers, timeliness, and other things that can be quantified or regularized. This also shows your ability to measure what you're doing, how it improves the organization, and even you improving on those results. Mentioning weekly and monthly etc was very important, it shows consistency, measuring, hard work, etc. Adding religion, marital status, etc are not really important for CVs either. Personally if I see marital status on your CV, I imagine that you're not learning about this from the right people

I have a blog post about this subject, kindly learn from it.

Interviews

In your CV, you need to be specific with what you can do. If you come to an interview, and just say you have skills and a first class, I wont hire you.

Great employers would always give you the chance to ask questions at the end of the interview. If you do not ask a question, it is a red flag. It means you have not adequately prepared for the interview, you have not done any proper research about the hiring organization, or you just want the money. During the interview, talk about your experiences working with others on projects, programs, products, etc. No matter the job you're looking for. It shows your versatility, other ways you could add value and be useful.

You should also think about business processes and operations. How does the job you want fit in the organization? Which kinds of roles might you be reporting to? What are the products and services they have and how do you see yourself fitting in helping the company drive more revenue and impact? This shows you are more employable.

Being Competitive
Accra has several more job, career and business opportunities, than every town or city in Ghana. Accra ultimately has businesses that make more money and can hire more people. One can identify opportunities by showcasing how organizations can do things to make more money, more impact, etc. If you can help the organization do that, that's your job or business opportunity right there. You can also identify opportunities by volunteering or working under organizations for free, or spending time with them. You might be able to see a problem that exists that they dont see because they do things in certain ways. That insight you share could cause the organization to want to work with you as well.

When we have Barcamps around Ghana, a popular discussion is about people who are not from or living in a certain town coming to take certain jobs in that town. An opportunity is getting close to such people who have been hired for certain reasons - mostly due to ability, experience and work ethic. In chatting with such people, they could learn from you on things about the town and it could create opportunities for you too, because you'd also become part of their network and you could be given a chance in a role to learn and improve yourself

Education & Jobs

Lots of jobs require a certain level of education so there are many jobs some people might not get. But the jobseeker can start from a job in one organization and work their way up by succeeding at certain tasks, learning from others and getting more technical and soft skills to become more employable

There are normally so many people applying for the same jobs. Having a certain level of education, years of experience, certain skills, results, recommendations make some CVs or people stand out. Even after that, you could still have 10 university graduates for 1 job and most employers would chose that 1 person based on fit, skill set, experience, etc.

Volunteering
Volunteering is extremely important. I always ask tertiary students I meet what they did with their long vacations. It is a great way to ascertain the value of a student or potential employee or entrepreneur in general. Some are able to get internship and work opportunities due to their skills, reputation, network and nepotism. Getting favours through nepotism would catch up to you. Volunteering is a great way to build experience and all youth must take this seriously, because skills, reputation and network also follow from it. There are various opportunities to #volunteeringh, including this one via GhanaThink’s Ghana Volunteer Program.

Salary, etc
If an employer asks you about salary, you can also ask the employer, what kind of budget they have for the position? This question is really about a negotiation. Most employers have ranges of salary for certain position, they finalize on an amount based on experience, value, etc. It's always good to mention your previous salary amount and say you want to be paid more. You can also research what the entry level salary for certain jobs are and add a bit more. Or give a range based on what you know.

Entrepreneurship

You should not start a business without learning under someone. You would pick great things from someone or also see bad things you should not repeat under someone. You need to see business ideas thriving, so it's best if you see others do so, instead of jumping right in without having been part of any business.

Future of Work
The future of work would include many jobs we've never seen before and reduced numbers for some jobs. We need to become skilled and experts at different things but have a strong ability to learn new things. We should focus on doing different types of work around a career, instead of knowing how to do just one job. If you have not started learning how to use AI and prompt engineering in general, you are behind.

Bonus Points

You can build experience working in an internet cafe, working with a small provision store, etc. You then need to show bigger organizations the skills you learn from working with those people and how that would be important in other organizations. If you are educated, you should be able to use your education to help others.

Your research would show up in how you answer questions or speak about what you have studied. You would demonstrate knowledge, examples of how things can be applied, understand concepts, and have an idea of how to solve problems you meet, etc.

Social media
I'm on social media via twitter.com/Abocco, facebook.com/aulzenap, Instagram.com/mightyafrican, linkedin.com/aulzenap - as someone looking to be employer, work, etc, you need to be on LinkedIn & Jobberman.

If you want to say thank you for this blog post, learn some Ahanta :-) Yoo y'eninenyah Ato y'ɛlawo ase somaa. Nyamenele yilaa wo. (Sir Ato, thank you so much for your time with us today. May God bless you.