Certificates no longer guarantee jobs, seek demonstrable skills – JAMB Registrar Oloyede tells students

The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) boss, Professor Ishaq Oloyede, has advised Nigerian youths to get skills that can help them survive, saying that soon university degrees will not be enough to get jobs.

Oloyede said this on Thursday at Kwara State University, Malete, when he gave the convocation lecture, called “Learning, Unlearning, and Relearning: Prerequisites of the Digital Age.”

He said, “The high-tech sector will have new opportunities, and skills that normal schools don’t teach will be needed. Degrees will not be the only thing that matters for jobs, but skills that can be shown.

“In this way, there will be no big difference between those who can read and write and those who can’t without the sharp skills that go with the trio—learning, unlearning, and relearning.”

He also said that the trio is very important for life as it gives energy to living well in today’s information age.

He said, “Those who can learn, unlearn, and relearn are the winners, and those who don’t have the mind to do the trio will always complain.”

He also said that the world of today is not like the stone age, saying that “one of the things that made this change is everything that makes the information age, which is still changing as technology grows fast.”

He also said that the world is changing and has new chances and problems, saying that while there are new chances in information technology, the old jobs like typists, receptionists, normal printers, phone booth workers, computer workers, factory workers, cashiers, travel workers, fuel workers, and others are going to end.

The JAMB leader also told the people, and Nigerians, to get ready for the problems of the information age.

He said, “Everyone has to be ready for the problems of the information age by learning all the time and being ready to change as things change.”

The Acting Head of the University, Professor Shaykh-Luqman Jimoh, said before in his speech that the lecture would make people learn more.

He said, “Because we are in a time of new technology, the lecture today would make us learn more. This is also true when our schools must be agents of change, making our graduates ready not only for today’s problems but for the changing world of the digital age.