- Presco’s SIAT Academy Graduate Trainee Programme offers structured training, mentorship, and job rotations to position agriculture as a viable and prestigious career path for young graduates.
- The initiative is designed to support Presco’s expansion while also challenging outdated perceptions of agriculture by showcasing its technical, sustainable, and large-scale operations.
- Though modest in scale, the programme sends a strong message to policymakers, universities, and the corporate sector about agriculture’s potential to drive youth employment and professional growth.
The palm oil giant has started a year-long graduate trainee program, betting that investing in people and not just plantations will transform agriculture into a profession of the future.
When 26 young graduates walked into Presco’s offices in July, they were stepping into something unusual.
Not unusual in the sense of being experimental because the curriculum was carefully designed and the trainers were intentionally picked, but unusual because in Nigeria’s agricultural sector, formal graduate academies and trainings are rare.
Presco, one of Nigeria’s largest palm oil producers, launched a new initiative, the SIAT Academy Graduate Trainee Programme. The programme is intended to be more than a training course. Over the course of a year, participants will move between classroom sessions, mentoring and on-the-job rotations.
At the end of the programme, if the students meet performance benchmarks, they will be moved into management within Presco and the wider SIAT Group. In Nigeria’s labour market, where many graduates are struggling to secure interviews, this promise is striking.
“This is an investment in people, not just plantations”
Agriculture in Nigeria has always carried contradictions. Millions of Nigerians are employed by agriculture directly or through the value chain, but it is still seen by many graduates as a last resort, something to fall back on if banking or oil and gas do not work out. Industry leaders argue that perception is a huge chunk of the problem.
Presco, which operates plantations and processing facilities across Edo, Delta and Rivers states, and more recently in Ghana, is determined to show that agriculture offers a lot more than the subsistence Nigerians associate it with. The academy is, in that sense, an investment in people as much as in the business itself.
“This programme is not just about training — it’s about transformation,” said Reinout Impens, Presco’s Chief Operating Officer and director of the academy. His words may sound aspirational, but the structure of the programme bears them out. Those who pass through successfully are expected to begin their careers as assistant managers and taking on responsibility within a year
A slow attempt to change perceptions
There is, of course, an element of self-interest. Presco is expanding — it has acquired operations in Ghana and Saro Oil Palm in Nigeria — and expansion requires people able to run complex systems. Plantations seem straightforward from a distance, but in reality, they are technical and massive operations involving technology, sustainability compliance, logistics and the delicate balance of local community relations. The academy is, in part, a pipeline for this new complexity.
But the company also appears to be attempting something wider. By branding the initiative as “Pan-African” and running it across borders, it is making a claim that agriculture deserves the same attention and ambition that other sectors enjoy. This is making the audacious assertion that palm oil should be spoken of in the same breath as oil and gas, banking or telecoms — industries where graduate recruitment programmes are the norm.
The hesitation lies in whether young people will see it that way. Agriculture has been burdened with decades of underinvestment, and reversing that perception will take more than a single initiative. Yet for the 26 graduates now in post, the shift is already happening.
Early impressions
Several of the new recruits have spoken about their surprise at the scale of Presco’s operations. It is not just the plantations but the refineries, the biogas facility, and the packaging lines. “You realise it is an entire ecosystem,” one said. Another remarked that the presence of sustainability officers and engineers in the same room as field managers made the work feel less like farming and more like a modern industry.
These are small observations, but they matter. They suggest that the academy is not simply about filling vacancies but about reshaping how a profession is imagined. If it works, graduates in agricultural faculties might begin to see oil palm as a credible destination rather than a reluctant fallback.
A delicate balancing act
It would be naive to pretend that challenges are not ahead. Training 26 graduates a year will not transform an industry that employs millions. Nor is retention guaranteed: well-trained managers are always attractive to competitors, and many are lured into better-paid sectors.
Presco’s executives acknowledge this. Some will leave, they admit, but even those who do may carry the industry forward elsewhere. It is a modest but not unimportant contribution. And in a sector often criticised for failing to create career paths, modest steps are not insignificant.
Beyond the company gates
There is also a quieter message here, directed less at the graduates themselves than at policymakers and partners. For the government, the academy hints at how private firms might share in the task of youth employment, which remains one of Nigeria’s most pressing challenges. For universities, it signals a willingness to connect classroom learning to industry needs. And for the corporate world more broadly, it points to agriculture as a sector that is beginning to professionalise.
These messages are implied rather than proclaimed, but they do not go unnoticed. “When a company invests like this, it changes the conversation,” said Olawunmi Farominiyi, a policy expert and strategist. “Students start to believe that a career in agribusiness is not only possible but potentially prestigious.”
A long view
The academy’s second batch of trainees will begin in September, effectively doubling the size of the inaugural cohort. Over time, Presco and its parent company, the SIAT Group, hope this initiative will develop into a hub for agribusiness leadership across West Africa.
Whether that ambition is realised remains to be seen. Yet there is something slightly different here: the integration of the academy into Presco’s everyday operations gives it a weight that short-term projects often lack.
If it succeeds, the initiative may achieve two things at once. It will provide Presco with the managers it needs for its own growth. But it might also — slowly, and unevenly — help to shift the way agriculture is viewed by the country’s graduates. Not as an afterthought, but as a profession in which one can build a career and, perhaps, even a future.
