By Adedapo Adesanya
The Minister of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy, Mr Bosun Tijani, intends to close the world’s tech talent shortage by almost a quarter with Nigerian workers.
He said this would be achieved through the federal government’s plan to train 3 million technical talents over the next four years.
The initiative could help achieve President Bola Tinubu’s goal of creating a million tech jobs in the first two years of his administration.
“I believe, based on data that LinkedIn has projected, Nigeria can fill about 23 per cent of the current global shortage in technology talents,” Mr Tijani said on Wednesday.
The Three Million Tech Talent (3MTT) programme will be run based on a 1-10-100 model.
According to the Minister, the idea is to test a prototype with 1 per cent of the target—30,000—for the first three months.
However, around 2 million applications were received in less than 30 days for the first cohort.
Mr Tijani also announced that the second cohort will focus on 30,000 people and begin in February 2024.
He said lessons from these batches will help scale the program to achieve the 3 million target.
For the first batch, selected participants will be trained on twelve technical skills, namely software development, UI/UX design, data analysis and visualisation, quality assurance, product management, data science, animation, AI/machine learning, cybersecurity, game development, cloud computing, and Dev Ops.
Speaking at his first press briefing after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) late last month in Abuja, he gave insights on the progress, adding that the programme would change the country’s ICT sector.
He noted that this training will also help Nigeria export talent to countries like Japan which is facing a dwindling population and needs to rely on exporting talent to power its tech-oriented economy.
“We’d like to be a net exporter of talent, we’d like our young people who are technologically savvy to work remotely for companies all over the world,” he said.
