The thing about work and career in Nigeria that bothers me the most is that it feels like young people no longer have the simple, basic luxury of dreaming. And even when they do dream, it often remains just that – a dream, suspended in possibility, never quite allowed to land in real life. As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time job hunting, I have seen firsthand how brutal and uncertain the process can be.
In Nigeria, you typically enter university at about seventeen, straight after secondary school, if you’re lucky, and not a casualty of the chaotic, underfunded and mismanaged JAMB process. Now imagine our hypothetical student finally gains admission at eighteen or nineteen. But even then, they may not get their preferred course. They might be placed into something completely different, and changing it could cost them another year or two. By this point, their timeline is already stretching.
Then come the ASUU strikes. It’s almost a rite of passage. A four-year course becomes six. Sometimes more. The student, who should have graduated at twenty-one or twenty-two, now finishes at twenty-four or twenty-five. Sometimes even twenty-six or twenty-seven. But they’re not done yet. NYSC is mandatory. That’s another year. So now, at twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven, they’re finally ready to enter the workforce.
And this is where the real contradiction appears.
Most organisations don’t want to hire fresh graduates unless they’ve been trained. And how do they train them? Through graduate trainee programs. But many of those programs come with age limits – twenty-five, maybe twenty-six at most.
So you have a system that delays young people at every stage, only to disqualify them at the end for being “too old.” What happens then? Many are forced into survival decisions. They either jump into business without preparation or take roles far below their potential – jobs with no clear growth trajectory, no structure and no real future.
This is the situation of many Nigerians. The system that stretches your youth and then punishes you for how long it took.
Because of these: spending a good part of your twenties waiting – waiting for admission, waiting for strikes to end, waiting to graduate, waiting to serve, waiting for a call back, waiting for someone to take a chance on you – you unconsciously lose the part of yourself that once believed anything was possible.
You begin to edit your desires. So instead of asking, What do I really want to become? You start asking, What can I manage? What can I survive? That is a very different kind of life.
I don’t think a lot of young Nigerians realise how much of their twenties pass in waiting rooms, physical and metaphorical ones. Maybe that is why so many young people seem restless, impatient, or desperate for quick success. And if care isn’t taken, two masters start to drive the wheels at this point – greed or fear. The fear that if they don’t make something happen quickly, time will swallow them whole.
But if you ask me what I would tell my fellow young people and the ones to come, my answer would be: start preparing for the real world the moment you step into university. If the system is slow, unpredictable, and often unfair, then the only thing within your control is how early you begin to prepare yourself. Intern, volunteer, work closely with creative and resourceful people. Just don’t stay still.
More importantly, don’t limit your imagination to the borders of your immediate environment. Develop a global outlook on your career. The internet has dissolved many of the old barriers. You can work for companies in different countries, learn from people you may never meet physically, and build skills that are valuable far beyond your local job market. But that kind of opportunity requires awareness. It requires curiosity. It requires the willingness to look outward.
Too many young people are trained to think only in terms of the opportunities immediately around them. So ask bigger questions. What skills are in demand globally? What industries are growing? What problems are people solving in other parts of the world? Where could your knowledge be useful beyond your immediate city, or even your country?
Because when your vision is global, your options multiply. And when your options multiply, your dreams begin to materialise. In a perfect system, young people would be allowed to dream first and figure out the rest later. But in the system we have, dreaming must walk hand in hand with preparation.
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