Most developing countries are making a very big mistake of plundering their natural resources in an effort to revive their economies. This has been evident in quite a number of countries that continue to put their hopes in natural resources instead of boosting other sectors of their economies. Such actions have been displayed in many high profile continental and global business conferences where some developing countries have showcased mining opportunities to the world in the hope that inviting other countries to extract the minerals will save their economies. 

The first big step developing countries should take in developing their economies is talent development. These countries should learn from developed countries like USA where most of the youths are employed in the entertainment industry. The entertainment industry is one of the most important economic sectors of America as it employs thousands of youths. This means their economy has the capacity to employ the bigger chunk of their populations and run without the plundering of natural resources. 

Developing countries need to focus more on promoting the service industry by promoting the service industry as well as intellectual property rights. By focusing on alternative business options such as electronic commerce, digital banking, digital healthcare and other service industries, mineral resources and other sources of wealth can be saved. Mining activities can then be done just to support the annual budgets, and suspended when production is not necessary.

Most developing countries have been plundering their natural resources by creating a lawless mining society with several loopholes that allow smugglers to at free will. Future generations now face the threat of a dead service industry coupled with depleted natural resources.

Billions of talented people continue to live in abject poverty due to the nature of the poor academic systems used in some parts of the world. Almost any given opportunity in today’s age requires one to have at least an undergraduate degree. We all know and understand the nature of the problems faced by people who do not have access to proper education and educational materials. One secret question hovers our minds and never gets a satisfactory answer…amidst the continuous population growth and rising dependency ratios, what are these people expected to do and where are they supposed to go?

For one to secure a job, every employer is demanding a degree upfront. For one to participate in a fellowship, contest, bootcamp or any other life-changing opportunity, most organisers list the undergraduate degree as the minimum requirement for participation. If one decides to migrate to another country that is conducive for their activities, a degree is needed for a work visa, which is so restricting for most talented individuals who are not degree holders. With the fast-growing numbers of challenges faced by their global communities, good examples being high population growth, climate change, water and sanitation, and challenges threatening aquatic life to mention a few, will the graduates be able to cope with the rising demand for solutions? What are non degreed innovators supposed to do?

It is a well-known fact that most students from the developing countries do not have access to proper education. Their academics are based on reciting textbooks instead of strategic thinking. As a result, most of the opportunities are channelled to undeserving candidates while those with the right skillsets are sidelined. Most employers, recruitment agents, organisers of life-changing opportunities and other communities have lost a good understanding of what it means to be an educated person and they now confuse certificates for education. The question remains…where are the talented non-degree holders supposed to go? 

Most employers and tertiary academic institutions now have very strict requirements for their recruitments. Prospective candidates are expected to have average or better passes in subjects like mathematics, science and the English language, and prospective candidates that do not meet this requirement are automatically disqualified. A lot of companies list degrees as the minimum requirements for their recruitment, but we do have several extremely qualified candidates whose academic careers were greatly disturbed by wars, poverty, and other naturally occurring phenomenons. How is their survival supposed to be?

Discrimination against non-certificate holders has become a major issue of concern in the modern day world. This is a serious issue that requires the intervention of governments, human rights organisations and other powerful organisations such as the United Nations. Most companies have introduced the unsolicited idea submission policy which hinders talented freelancers from marketing their ideas to established corporates. Some brilliant innovators do not have access to capital to fund their innovations and bring them to life, at the same time they do not have the required academic qualifications to contest on the job markets. What are they supposed to do?

These talented people need to be absorbed into the mainstream economy so that they can contribute to the global development. This is will also reduce the dependency ratios amongst able-bodied populations. 

Most youths in the developing world are now finding comfort and solace in antisocial practices such as drug abuse as corporates and organisations have turned their back on their brilliant projects just because they are not degreed. Drug abuse, early childhood marriages, broken families, anger, resentment, suicides, college and job dropouts are all direct results of this kind of discrimination which continues to insist that non degree holders are not an important part of the society. 

What is discrimination, if we were to use honest and proper weighing of actions? Non degree holders are discriminated to such as an extent that they have become a useless part of the society. Non-degreed talented enthusiasts from the developing hardly have the chance to succeed without those certificates. It needs to be noted that these lone voices need a proper storytelling platform and we need to give them a sympathetic ear and understand the academic career disturbances they would have faced. Some of these non-degree holders we continue discriminating on a daily basis come from pathetic backgrounds with varying forms of situations; broken families, orphaned and child-headed families, abuse, forced career, poverty, lack of education and educational materials, disability and other circumstances beyond their control. 

Let’s all campaign for proper education reforms to accommodate every global citizen.

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The 21st century has been the toughest century in the history of humanity as it is characterised by intense competition in every field. Both the employment and entrepreneurial sectors are heavily dominated by the powerful and highly influential minority. In this century, survival belongs to the fittest. While billions of people are struggling for employment, in the same world, some are being hired by up to ten high-paying companies at the same time.

Amidst the current employment crisis, the academic institutions continue pouring millions of graduates into the already flooded job markets. Whoever is trying to find a job should know and understand the key factors that need to be put into consideration when applying for a new job position. Below are some of the important key points where most job seekers are failing to make it.

You are marketing your certificates instead of marketing your abilities

Most of today’s graduates tend to focus more on their certificates than on their capabilities. We have since shifted from the certificates era into the skills and competence era where skills and competence matter more than what you have learned in the classroom. It is sad to note that most academic systems, especially those of the underdeveloped world, are mainly centred on teaching people to read and write, instead of developing their talents and skills. In the modern day world, it is not what you have learned in the classroom that matters, it is how you respond to the daily social nuances and life demands of each minute.

It is sad to note that most people, especially fresh graduates, have a great enthusiasm and uncontrollable sense of achievement, they believe that they are the most educated generation in the computer age, and they have learnt in a generation where everything is available in the classroom and on the internet, contrary to the ancient days when scholars would struggle to find very reliable information sources.

Every prospective job seeker needs to acknowledge that we have since shifted from the ancient times when education was scarce and only the few educated people would be hired by the top companies, and the world’s population was still at controlled levels, meaning the competition was stable. Also, there was an almost universal, standard academic system, which ensured equal and competitive academic standards across the planet. Hence it was easier for the employer to assess your academics, unlike in the modern day word where we have millions of academic boards mushrooming, most of which are only profit oriented. It has to be noted, however, that your curriculum vitae is the first thing you should hand your employer since since it highlights your key skills and competences, and more importantly, samples of your past work an achievements. Academic certificates have to be somewhere in-between main documents and supporting documents. You need to show the employer that you have an outstanding skill, and you have taken some complimentary courses that add cream to the piece of cake.

Most of today’s job seekers fail to make it because they have all the necessary academic skills, but they lack passion, enthusiasm and the required skillset at large. Below are some of the main reasons why you don’t get hired.

You write generic applications

Most of today’s job seekers have become desperate to such an extent that they no longer have specific areas of focus. Most of the top companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Tesla, have highly trained and experienced interviewers who are now aware of any hidden points that should be brought to the light. Playing your tricks to impress the judging panel might not work. Most applicants do not have a specific field of interest and they are just seeking employment. This problem is not only prevalent in companies but also in tertiary academic institutions where some students do not have clearly defined visions and goals. Some people will chose to pursue any field that has something to do with commercials, but fail to clearly define their intended goals, whether they are pursuing banking and finance or accounting. You need to be very specific in both your job application and other forms of publications such as supporting documents, extra-curricular activities and marketing channels. In the corporate world, there is nothing such as “Any Job”. If you are a programmer, mention it, ‘I am a programmer’, not ‘I want to be a programmer’,or I need anything related to computers. That narrows your chances of success. Those simple mistakes can cost you the whole opportunity to be hired by a leading company.

You spend much of your precious time celebrating historic achievements

When applying for a position, it is always a good thing to revisit your past achievements but not to be stuck in them. Most people fail to please their prospective employers by overratting their past achievements. You need to note that what you call an achievement is not an achievement to everyone else. Also, an achievement needs to be celebrated only once so that you focus on the future and pave way for future successes.

It is not a very wise thing to continue celebrating a success you made a decade ago instead of pursuing more successes. Most companies are well pleased with people who celebrate their success once and focus on newer pursuits. The person who invented the car celebrated victory only once. A few years later, someone else introduced a plane, and later on, someone else came with the hyperloop technology. This clearly illustrates that no victory is short-lived and not permanent.

Whenever your prospective employer asks you about your past achievements, it is always a wise thing to indicate that you have the zeal to achieve more accomplishments once they hire you. While it is very tempting for your to idle on your past achievements, humility is always a good thing and allows you to ignore past successes and pursue new ones.

You are too proud to take a stepping stone

This is a very common phenomenon in the modern day world. People have become ‘too educated’ to do any kind of a job. The walls of Jericho were not built in one day. At some point, Tom Cok was just a general somebody at Apple. Bill gates was once a low-profile someone before starting the journey of Microsoft. Most of today’s graduates are too smart to do anything that is below their standards of academics.

There is what we call a stepping stone. Once you manage to find a low position, utilise it to show the value you can bring to the firm. By so doing, you will be opening up more opportunities by making the headlines on the company’s listings. This will be a stepping stone for you, paving way for greater successes ahead. I tis very unfortunate that most of today’s people are only after money.

You probably don’t want to learn

Most of today’s job seekers believe that they are the most educated generation. They have no time to learn since they believe they know it all. What we learn in school is not exactly the same as what we are most likely to encounter in the real corporate world. Technology is moving at a fast pace. Thousands, if not millions, of new discoveries are being made each day anew. No matter what institution you have been enrolled at, be it Princeton, MIT or Harvard; by the time you finish your academics, new technological developments would have been made. No one is too qualified to learn from other people. While fresh graduates come with loads of theoretical knowledge, it is important that the old horses in the company possess a lot of practical experience in the field as well as extensive knowledge of the company’s historic performance, the company’s roadmap and values as well they would have gained over the years.

In the modern day world, most people are finding it very difficult to secure employment because they want to prove to be knowledgeable more than the experienced people who have been in the organisation for decades.

Most startup companies are reported to have succumbed to competition yet it is all about a faulty internal hiring management system creating all the problems. A newly established company needs a very enthusiastic operations team in every sector to increase the operational efficiency while reducing expenses. Competition will always be present, no matter what kind of a business you are running, whether you have a first-mover advantage or not. Most businesses succumbed to early competition by hiring the wrong people, which makes way for their competitors to catch them unaware. Below are some of the biggest mistakes you might have been making in your hiring processes.

You are not taking part in recruitment processes

As the company leader, you are the eyes of the company, the visionary who knows and deeply understands the objectives of the company. While companies are expected to participate in various forms of corporate social responsibilities, employment is not directly in line with those. The main objective of the company is not to provide employment but to provide service and be profitable. Recruitment matters are a no mercy game.

As the company leader, you should know exactly what it needs for the company to start up in a vibrant manner and withstand the competition. Employment is not all about filling the vacant positions in a company. It is a demanding processes which requires a great deal of wisdom and understand the company culture and value, clearly identifying positions that need to be filled, and hiring the right people for the position.

Although it is really necessary, many people will miscalculate the move and take it as a strategy for nepotism. Nepotism has been well known for being one of the leading causes of company failure. Playing a crucial role in recruitment matters does not mean interfering with of staff’s duties, neither does it give you a license for nepotism. Also, if you are afraid of being labelled as a bad person by friends and relatives, it does not mean you will have to conduct interviews. As a leader you should learn to delegate tasks. Although the recruitment processes may be conducted by other staff members, but it is your mandate as a company leader to know and understand the kind of people being recruited to join the company.

You lack a proper distinction between qualifications and skills

This is the most difficult task for any recruiter. Even big companies are still struggling with this issue. The academics of the present day world are no longer as powerful as they used to be in the ancient world. In today’s world, we have millions of academically qualified people, but only tens of talented and skilled people. Most people have pursued the wrong courses due to quite a number reasons that include forced career paths, the non-availability of the diversified courses in some academies and so on. Because of these countless reasons, we now have millions of qualified people who are qualified for the tasks they are unable to do.

The present day world now calls for skills and competence much more than mere certificates. As an employer, you need to assess the competence levels of your stuff instead of easily getting impressed by academic certificates. In as much as academic certificates are an important part of recruitment considerations, most of them do not have a clear indication of competence levels as they are obtained under classroom conditions and not the recommended industrial standards.

Your interviews are base on displaying oratory skills than the actual competencies

Most job interviews produced inaccurate results. This is global disaster that needs the immediate attention of recruiters before it ruins more more companies. While it is not everyone who was born with good oratory skills, most companies are mainly focusing on the assessment of those oratory skills and other unnecessary stuff. Although good communication skills are a prerequisite for some job positions, it has to be noted that outstanding oratory or dressing skills are not directly linked to competence.

As a recruiter, you need to have a proper distinction between oratory skills and competence. That is the main reason why some companies are now opting for hybrid interviews in which both oral and writing skills are presented, and in some cases, the applicants may be asked to prove their competence through practicals and or reference to portfolios of their past work.

These are basically some of the leading causes of failure in recruitment processes. Know your position as the company leader. Learn to delegate tasks, but do not neglect your powers as the visionary of the company. You know and understand the right skills required, and you have a better understanding of where the company is coming from and where it is going.

With the rapidly increasing population, the scarcity of resources will undoubtedly grow to be a much greater problem in the next few years. However, with the continuously decreasing levels of human capital through mechanisation, it will become much more challenging for the few remaining resources to drive the global economy. To overcome these challenges, we will have to consume all the resources for our own survival and have the future generations paying the price, or rather starve ourselves as a sacrifice for future generations to reap the benefits. The greatest task we have in this world is not just to teach people, but to fully develop their talents to the maximum, helping them to identify their passion and purpose. To understand that, you have to go back ten years, when experts laid their first brick onto the foundation of what would become the world’s greatest lethal weapon of mass destruction, artificial intelligence.

Vehicles becoming autonomous, computers beginning to think like humans, human body tissue autonomously regenerating, people will become jobless. Academic certificates will be replaced by skills and competence. General education will be completely obscured by talent development. With academic institutions pouring millions of graduates into the job markets annually, the graduates will throng the streets and pavements holding placards and chanting slogans, protesting for jobs. Farmers will lose jobs to industries as industrial affluence will be churned into edible products, while farming will be completely mechanised. Food residues will be used to produce synthetic fibre for clothing. Computer programmers will finally surrender their jobs to artificial intelligence. Most professions will be replaced by machines. Only highly competitive individuals and companies will survive the intense competition. The theme of the millennium will be, ’Survival of the Fittest’.

Doctors will not have enough apparatus to use as thermometers and ultrasonic scanners will be embedded inside wearables. Man will have embedded chipsets for real-time digital health monitoring. The eye contact lens will be replaced by microscopic circuitry. Dentistry will become the job of enzymes. No company will be commercially mass-producing clinical instruments as family doctors will be replaced by artificial intelligence. Most industries will cease to operate due to the introduction of nano-factories. Money will cease to exist in the developed communities. Bank tellers will be a thing of the past. Most academic institutions will close as toddlers learn through mixed reality. The Internet will be ubiquitous like bacteria, with connection speeds of up to several terabytes per second. Electricity will be wirelessly conducted. Education will become much more efficient as people learn involuntarily and independently from any geographical location at any given time.

Then, where will those millions of graduates go? How will they survive the man versus machines war? How do we expect to achieve SDG 10, Reduced Inequalities, when academic institutions are widening the gaps between academically brilliant and struggling students? How do we expect to reach SDG 8 when there is no one to represent the marginalised groups of innovators whose academic careers are threatened? Some of the SDGs will most likely remain theoretical.

The seeds of poverty were sown a thousand years ago when our ancestors failed to embrace the paradigm shift in talent development. Poverty does not grow from the soil, it is a legacy passed on from one generation to another in form of mindset.

Schools have become prisons where children are guillotined and tossed into the grave. They are mostly concerned with their pass rates rather than students’ future. School is the worst nightmare I ever had in my life. I told my teachers skill was the goal, but they insisted the certificate was; a disseminated traditional belief, a euphemism for failure. Our techniques for measuring academic performance are obsolete, obscuring a complete picture of how we are faring.

In phenomenology, they say, “The ‘thisness’ of the this is within the ‘thisness’ of the this, and the ‘banananess’ of the banana is within the ‘banananess’ of the banana”. It is not the colour or the taste of the banana which makes the banana what it is, it is the banananess of the banana that does, that is the taste of the banana. Likewise, the ‘millionaireness’ of a millionaire is within the ‘millionaireness’ of the millionaire. It is not the state of having a million dollars in your bank account that makes you a millionaire. Being a millionaire is a mindset. It is not the state of being a graduate engineering student that makes you an engineer. Being an engineer is a mindset. Tools do not make the artist. A certificate does not make a professional. Professionalism is not a job, it is a calling.

It is a saddening fact that the developing world produces millions of graduate doctors annually but every hour someone flies to a developed country to seek medical attention. Millions of engineers are produced but the countries have poor industrialisation levels. Millions of graduate professionals are poured out from universities, but they cannot even revive their economies. The graduates believe their degrees were the greatest investment they made, yet they cannot not change even one thing in the world. Their degrees are just ornamental and useless.

The developed world always has a few graduates as millions of students drop out of college to innovate, run businesses and venture into the entertainment industry. The developing world produces millions of these graduates who are not even capable of maintaining the current standards. Their curriculums are only based on teaching people to read and write.

According to Albert Einstein, the true value of education is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learnt from the textbooks. Also, The 13 Secrets of Napoleon Hill and Unleashing Your Brilliance are two books that clearly explain human brain anatomy, relating it to productivity. Production cannot be measured by the number of graduates we produce or our school pass rates. The creation of professionals is the creation of a legacy. Like the Siamese Fighting Fish, no two are ever the same. Greatness cannot be measured. Talent development embodies the pinnacle of human achievement, for those who understand that true gravitas is a whisper, not a shout. Only when talent and passion align can the true miraculous occur.

We need to foster talent development and ensure that even the unqualified have some income generating activities to do so as to reduce poverty and antisocial activities, as well as the early childhood marriages we always speak against. Once we adhere to this maxim, everything else will follow.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton