Employers charge youths to acquire skills

Young Nigerians have been enjoined to acquire requisite skills as a way of tackling rising unemployment in the country.

Experts and employers who spoke at the opening of the second training centre of Daikin in Nigeria, in partnership with Field of Skills and Dream VTE, noted that skilled people are hardly unemployed.

The Vice President at Daikin Middle East and Africa (MEA), Tuna Gulenc, who noted that unemployment is a challenge in most countries of the world, said the training centre is a part of Daikin’s localization strategy to build a community of skilled workforce and equip them with all the necessary education required to excel in their career and contribute to Africa’s climate efforts by promoting sustainable cooling solutions.

“Unemployment is a problem in every country. The best way to tackle unemployment is skills development. So, institutes like FSD are definitely going to contribute to the economy of the country by bringing more young people with the required skills to the labour market. The market needs skilled people and the institute is a bridge for that,” he noted.

He said that the newly established centre is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities and training equipment, allowing the technicians to gain hands-on experience with Daikin’s cutting-edge HVAC solutions.

“We are proud to collaborate with FSD which comes with a proven track record of training technicians and positively contributing to the betterment of the Nigeria society for development and growth,” he added

Director at Field of Skills and Dream, Omowale Ogunrinde, who has been running training institutes for over 20 years in at least 14 states in the country, stressed that Nigeria needs to rejig her educational system to ensure that required skills are provided for the industry.

“You can’t be unemployed if you have skills. Young people are unemployed because they don’t have skills. No student that leaves here is unemployed. Even the ones we are yet to commence their training, people are competing to have them. That tells you that there are jobs, but there are no skilled people. So the educational system needs to be rejigged to ensure that we are teaching them what the industry needs so that they can have jobs,” she said.

She noted that the provision of modern and state-of-the-art HVAC training equipment by Daikin and upskilling the trainers at FSD, would help the institute to achieve its goal of producing more technicians equipped with the requisite skills to deploy professional services in global cooling technology across Nigeria

“The intervention of Daikin to upgrade FSD’s TVET skills development workshop for HVAC technicians could not have come at a better time than when we were expanding our training facilities to enable us to empower more young Nigerians with skills to access new jobs and start small businesses of their own. FSD has always said that there are jobs but no skilled people because we have a 100% employment rate for our trainees,” she said.