The Minister of Labour and Employment, Senator Chris Ngige, represented by Mrs Tilda Mmegwa, the senior Special Assistant to the President on job creation, says most youths are unemployed because of lack of functional skills.
He said this while declaring open a one day trade job, career and employability Fair, on Thursday in Abuja organized by the Nigerian Employers Consultative Association (NECA) in collaboration with the International Labour Organization (ILO) with the theme: “Promoting Employability, Skills Development and Decent Work”.
According to him ,the Nigerian government is conscious of the fact that most of the unemployed are those without functional skills, thus, all stakeholders must be actively involved in preparing the African workforce for the ‘future of work’; therefore the strategy is to equip the unemployed youths
with market -driven skills, which will facilitate their access to self or paid employment.
He said, Therefore the ministry is scheduled to train 37,000 unemployed graduates,1,000 in each of the states of the Federation and and the FCT on soft skills and marketable resume and in the coming months train 3,500 unemployed youth in various locations including fashion design, catering, event management, solar panel and CCTV installation, among others.
Our Correspondent spoke with some of the participants, who commended the organisers of the fair, also said the fair had given them the opportunity of a one-on-one career counseling and also job interviews.
