Whether it’s an employer or someone who wants to outsource his jobs to you, their most likely immediate evaluation of your capacity to deliver is (in many cases) your formal or academic brilliance. Although many Human Resource managers strongly disapprove of this kind of evaluation but many job givers as well as employers who need to make quick decisions about who to hire or who to outsource jobs to rely on it to make such decisions, especially when they have no seen the potential employee or contractor skills.
Hiring is just a part of the whole issue. When serious project managers or job owners discover you themselves and want to hand you a project to run, or in some cases they ask you to bid for the job along with other bidders. Such managers and job owners really want to give you the job, perhaps they have already concluded that it will go to you. I think it’s not surprising that they still ask you for academic achievements. They do this not because they are setting a criterion for the job or contract but for many of them, to further verify you will deliver.
The Nigeria labour market is tough, tougher than most other countries. Good academic achievements will of course give you an advantage. Undergraduate students have better chances of polishing their curriculum vitae; degree holders can of course plan to come through in their graduate studies with better performances. It may not be too hard to achieve better academic performance in current or later studies. One tip that has worked for many is to study adequately and review past exams questions.
Stronger advantages for getting the jobs or getting hired in the Nigerian labour market mostly is to have the required skills and the necessary papers to show for it at the same time. Whatever your career is, your skills will make you soar and the papers you have to show for them (skills) can set you apart. Joseph Ogbu, a digital marketing evangelist and founder of serinnent says, “going further to get certifications for your skills will set you further apart.” Certification itself is a way of marketing yourself. The same is applicable to your academic and formal achievements – they are not the things that get the job done but they market you effectively.
No matter how tough it gets in the labour market, you need not shiver, several people and job owners are looking for people who have the skills to deliver; you just need to get your formal and academic achievements prepared to market yourself to them.
