The reality of things has remained the same over the years: we live in a part of the world where thousands of graduates are produced every day from the 36 states of the country with no job placement/offers to contain them. Personally, I have been jobless for 8 years now since graduating school in the year 2017, when I obtained my first degree. How time flies! I didn't even keep track of the number of years until now that I decided to pen down my thoughts in this regard.
The hope of most graduates is to attend school, get certified in their chosen field, and come out to get a job that would serve as a source of income and the road to building their own career. I have believed that right after graduation as a microbiologist, some companies would hire me to work as a quality control officer or perhaps be employed in a medical lab to assist with diagnosis or anything related to my field of study. The reality of this has remained vague for the past 8 years that I have now completely lost interest. The equation now is more about survival than pursuing a career.
Whatever good our hands find doing, and if there be an earning opportunity in them, we embrace it wholeheartedly, so long as those jobs don't contain any vices or negative activities therein.
I came to the reality of learning a skill to create my own business really late. A lot of persons in my own category would rather prefer to be employed than create their own businesses; not many people have the business mentality, hence a lot of people stay idle until they come down to dreaded poverty and want.
Due to this menace of unemployment, business owners who have been privileged to succeed often use this as an excuse to bring up ridiculous job offers to people. Take, for example, my elder sister, who is equally a graduate in the job hunt and accepted to work as a teacher in a private primary school and comes home with a ridiculous paycheck every month.
Let's take a look at a school with a population of about 500 students paying 15k for school fees per term; that should result in an accumulated annual revenue of 7.5 million naira. Employing at least 20 teachers and choosing to pay them 20k monthly for the months of the year would mean that 4.8 million of the said amount (7.5M) would be spent on teachers' salaries. I believe that the remaining 2.7 million should be a fair amount to run the school with when managed properly. Besides the school fees is not the only inflow that generates revenue for the school. Here is a vivid example of how private school owners can create a fair job offer for teachers in such a category.
The reality of things is really different from the scenario above. Most private schools here employ less than 20 teachers; the most I have seen is 15 with a paycheck, according to what they feel like paying. The highest has been 15k for educated teachers with university degrees, while the others receive far less than that. Besides, the lesser number of teachers means more workload for the few hands employed.
Would you rather work out all it takes to create your own business and become self-employed or live your life on a salary far less than what can provide for your needs? For as many as graduate yearly to fall into this trap of unemployment or get stuck with these sorts of job offers, it will only be fair to you if you learn a thing from these lines and take the bull by the horn in order to succeed business- and career-wise.
*Images are mine