School curriculum should focus on soft skills – Rewane

Chief Executive Officer, Wave Academy, Mrs. Misan Rewane,

The Chief Executive Officer, Wave Academy, Mrs. Misan Rewane, speaks on the relevance of soft skills training for young people, among other issues, in this interview with IFE OGUNFUWA

What do you do at Wave Academy?

My job is to innovate on what we do until it gets better. We make it even more cost-effective than it already is and ensure our activities have high impact and deliver maximum value for unemployed young people and employers that we match them with.

What type of training do you give to unemployed graduates?

We train them in employability skills, one of which is effective communication. How to communicate what they know and what they don’t know; being mindful of their verbal and non-verbal communication. We teach them problem solving skills; how to think critically to solve problems in a structured way for customers, when addressing issues in their personal lives, for their employers and colleagues. We teach them time management; that is, how to manage their time though they have different things they need to do that are important. How they can address them in a structured way and prioritise to meet a particular deadline. We teach them expectation management; how they can manage expectations of people who are expecting something from them, to let them know they can get it done.

We teach them teamwork; how they can work effectively with others, especially when they are part of a team of people they didn’t select and we have all sorts of differences. How they should respect their fellow team members’ opinion, while also sharing their views even though they are different. Those are the kind of skills that we teach.

We use the hospitality, retail and service industries as case studies. So, when we teach problem-solving skills, we give examples of customer care in the hospitality industry. When we are teaching teamwork, they learn from projects in the hospitality and retail industries. But they are going to work across a range of industries like the logistics firms, beauty and lifestyle, fashion, hospitals, pharmacies, etc. For three weeks, we teach them how to think and we partner employers who will teach them how to do it.

How has workplace readiness programmes helped young graduates to secure jobs?

Those who don’t get directly connected to jobs are able to search for jobs on their own. We teach them how to write CVs, how to answer interview questions properly and we teach self-confidence, which will allow them to go out and get jobs. We actually connect them to available jobs from some employers. We work with close to 200 employers since we started two years ago. And whenever these employers have vacancies, they call us to let us know. We connect our students to these opportunities. Most importantly, we equip them with the knowledge they need to apply for jobs effectively. We have seen people when applying for jobs, they just forward their CVs from the cyber cafe with all the 16 other jobs they have applied to in the body of the email, without tailoring their application to that particular company.

We teach them how to find out the main challenges of the company, how to be a solution provider and add value to the company so that they can sell themselves.

Why has there been much emphasis of soft skills acquisition in recent times?

Apart from graduates, we need to teach our children these skills. They are life skills, which are relevant to success in life. You have to know how to communicate and manage your emotions, yourself and others. You will have to manage your husband one day, your children, subordinates and colleagues. In life, you have to manage your time and prioritise what you need to do. Nobody should go through life without learning these skills.

I don’t think we only need to teach our graduates, we need to teach our primary school and secondary school pupils. One of the things we want to do is to work closely with the secondary schools, because every secondary school should be able to teach these kids not only the sciences and English, but teach real life skills. We call them soft skills, which is ironic, because they are the hardest skills to teach. All our workers go through the same training as our trainees.

What kind of support should the government give to create jobs for graduates or the self-employed?

The support that the government can give to young people is to fix the education system so that it focuses on developing skills. We need to stop the focus on just certificates, credentials for credentials sake. Having the secondary school leaving certificate is not enough, what have they learnt? We have to change the focus to developing skills and competencies. The job of the government is to create an enabling environment that focuses on skills. We should go into the curriculum through the Curriculum Development Centre and ensure that students are taught these soft skills. We don’t need to teach team work, but we need to review the entire design of how we teach so that every time you have an activity, students in the classroom are working in a team.

Every time you teach, let the students think about the answers to questions rather than giving them to memorise. You are teaching them critical thinking and problem solving skills. Every time you ask students in a classroom to speak up and answer a question, rather than you standing and giving them a three-hour lecture, you are teaching them effective communication skills. Every time you give them a project and the autonomy on how they are going to design it, divide the tasks, and they have to manage the time, deadline and expectations, you are teaching them all these soft skills. It is about looking at the curriculum and making sure that it focuses on developing these skills and competencies, and not handing out certificates at the end of the senior secondary school with nothing to show for it.

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