How do you rise at work or in your industry to become a General Manager, Executive Director or even a CEO? Let me share an experience I had during my days in Diamond Bank Lagos; our learners in Tekedia Mini-MBA should be familiar with this, as I have shared it in our career-planning focused sessions.
In my first week in Diamond Bank, I visited the websites of the leading banks in Nigeria. I created a table, adding core skills, certifications, and degrees those senior executives had, as listed on their bios. When I was done, I saw one commonality: most were chartered accountants with an MBA.
Right there, I knew that if Ndubuisi should also be listed there one day, getting an ICAN and MBA should not be a bad thing, even though I have started as an engineer, out of FUT Owerri. (Later, I registered for ICAN, did the Graduate and Intermediate phases before I abandoned it when I left for the United States for a graduate program in engineering. I completed an MBA in UNICAL). The table gave me a window of what I had to do for the least requirements for the ascension to the top, in case my plan to emigrate did not work out.
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Then, as I worked in Diamond Bank, I developed another table. In that table, I was trying to make sense of the durability of careers in the banking sector. This was crucial as personally I like to be ahead of things. A first year lecture on logic and philosophy in FUTO shaped me: I see the world as numbers, and if you investigate numbers (yes, data), you can get revelations.
Over lunch, I asked the bank’s HR guys how many were hired in Year X, and how many remained in the bank, and in the industry (where data was available), after 3, 5, and 10 years. As I worked on the informal personal research, the data was like a yramid and brutal: most bankers in Nigeria peak at 5 years, and may never earn as much as they earned in their first 5 years, on average, ever!
In other words, I noticed that more than 50% of those who joined as entry level executive trainees will not survive the first 5 years, and less than 20% will be there in ten years. And most of those people will never get a job which would pay them better than what they were making in the banking sector, before they left the sector.
I looked at that Pyramid-shaped outcome and was concerned; they were not many opportunities at the top. What was the reason? The economy did not have a lot of opportunities for mid-level managers because it was yet to be fully developed. Except oil & gas, the fledgling telecom sector was yet to stabilize, but the oil & gas rarely hired from outside at mid-management.
In other words, there were limitations on transferring that 10-year banking experience to another industry, and being paid as well. Simply, the retail, agro, transportation, etc sectors were not going to compensate as much if one should be cut from the banking sector.
That data and the fact that the work I was doing (IT) convinced me to return back to electrical engineering. I used to couple and assemble laptops and computers; it was something geeky. But over time, it required no skill as people who did not even enter primary school were doing it as well. So, the IT career vulnerability was huge; IT then largely coupling and networking systems as software was not a big component of it. A refuge: engineering which I concluded was at the upstream level.
Sure, I might not have modeled it well. But there are things you could learn if you are still at the early stages of your career in Nigeria from my experience.. If you have a ten year banking experience in the US, you could be paid as well, if not more, if you decide to join the retail, transportation, venture investing, etc sectors, because most of those sectors have been well developed. Consequently, you can move across industries delivering your skill with no diminished compensation because of limited options.
In conclusion, it comes down to this: if you make it, glory awaits at the top of the pyramid, but if you do not make the cut, you will remain underpaid, should you be forced out of the banking sector.
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We have not developed many industries, it’s essentially 3: Oil and Gas, Banking, Telecom, even these 3 have been partially corrupted by cancer of ‘contract staff’, which ends up cutting the pay ticket. We do a lot of buying and selling but with no developed retail market, so what you have there as employees are in the same league with what you see in private schools.
Wherever you look across industries and sectors, you see poverty, because when you don’t have a sizable number of people in the middle-class who earn disposable income, poverty is guaranteed.
This does not require finger pointing and blame game, rather to rethink how see and do business. When you set up an enterprise with the mindset of paying people a minimum wage or below it, you are obviously not qualified to take part in this kind of conversation.
The land is filled with people with oppressive mindset, so, rather than opening opportunities and advancing prosperity, each person wants to control almost everything, for personal aggrandizement and lording it over others. We have disappointed ourselves and others here, and no need to believe the problem is elsewhere.
The SMEs are as good as micro businesses, they can’t pay decent wages. The corporations too few.
Across government, business owners, civil setvants, employee,” The land is filled with people with oppressive mindset, so, rather than opening opportunities and advancing prosperity, each person wants to control almost everything, for personal aggrandizement and lording it over others. ”
Very true sir