Adedapo Ajibade, executive secretary of Knowledge Exchange Centre, has said that its organisation’s Graduate Advancement Programme (GAP) has recorded 80 percent job placement success rate since its inception.
He stated this during the orientation ceremony of the 6th batch held recently. He went further to state that GAP includes every element required to assist graduates in finding meaningful work and quickening career counseling, mentoring, and internship opportunities.
According to him, “When we started the GAP, we only started with an employability programme and have recorded success over time. But now our graduates started requesting technical skills, and we started building technical skills in HR, content writing, data analytics, and digital marketing”.
“Based on our assessment from inception to last year, we have had an 80percent success rate of job placement within a year when you come to GAP and 60 percent within three months when you come into the gap.”
He continued by saying that the program gives graduates the skills they need in the workplace, giving them an advantage over their peers in landing a job.
He went further to indicate that more than 100 graduates have been trained in each of the previous five batches and that 102 graduates are now being trained in the sixth batch, bringing the total number of graduates trained since the program’s commencement to more than 200.
About GAP
The Centre for Entrepreneurship Knowledge Exchange, also known as the Knowledge Exchange Centre (KEC) is a non–profit organisation established in 2014 to tackle employability issues among fresh university graduates in Nigeria. We began operations on the 9th of February, 2015.
The Centre for Entrepreneurship Knowledge Exchange, also known as the Knowledge Exchange Centre (KEC), is a non-profit organization founded in 2014 to address employability issues through various training programmes and activities among Nigerian university graduates which began operations on February 9, 2015.
Its goal is to close the skills gap in the Nigerian labor market by offering a Resource Center with hybrid-Library facilities and various platforms that support capacity building for our target audience.
The training program focuses on employability, entrepreneurship, leadership, internships, and many other areas to prepare them for work, business, and the future, drawing on partnerships with reputable organizations and individuals across Nigeria.
GAP is a 10-week program is intended to strategically address the country’s unemployment issues, with the goal of addressing three key areas: a lack of job-relevant skills, unemployment/underemployment, and poor social networking skills, all of which are critical factors in addressing Nigeria’s unemployment issues.
The internship is partnered with SME Africa which has the largest network base of small businesses in Nigeria, and participants will be paired with the SMEs to help them apply what they have learned to obtain real-life experience.
In response to the country’s high rate of brain drain, Ajibade stated that the program is also preparing graduates with relevant skills to fill roles left vacant by skilled workers leaving the country.
In addition, Charles Nwodo, chairman of Excel Africa Group, stated that he was inspired to establish KEC as a corporate social responsibility vehicle for Excel Africa Group in order to assist graduates in obtaining the necessary skills for the twenty-first century and creating their own stories by learning from successful people around them with access to technology.
For instance, Adam Lawal, a GAP batch 4 alumnus, said the program gave him the confidence to think that he can succeed in anything he decides to do and helped him change his career from microbiology to data analyst.