The National Directorate of Employment (NDE) has recruited and deployed a total of 2,572 unemployed graduates of tertiary institutions across the country with various corporate oganisations under its transient job creation scheme.
NDE’s Head of Information and Public Relations Edmund Onwuliri disclosed this in a statement Monday in Abuja.
He said the scheme known as Graduate Attachment Programme (GAP) is aimed at providing transient employment opportunities for graduates, enhancing their employability, reducing restiveness among the youths and the rate of long-term unemployment caused by curtailment of employable entrants into the labour market.
Onwuliri said the scheme which would run for a period of three months in the first instance, has a six-month life span.
To be eligible for GAP, he said, each candidate must have graduated from a tertiary institution and equally must have completed the mandatory one year National Your Service Programme.
“During the period of attachment, the interns are expected to gain requisite practical work experience and ascertain their indispensability to the organisations they are deployed to which may lead to a possible retention at the completion of the internship,” the statement said.
The agency said in line with her statutory mandate, it recently concluded a 5-day entrepreneurship skills training for graduates of tertiary institutions across the country.
The training which engaged fifty graduates from each of the thirty-Six states of the federation and the FCT, was organised under the Small Scale Enterprises programme of the Directorate tagged Start Your Own Bussiness (SYOB).
Speaking while monitoring the SYOB training in Uyo, Akwa Ibom state, NDE Director-General Abubakar Nuhu Fikpo said the training was designed to provide critical skills needed to enable the participants identify viable business ideas, package same into bankable feasibility reports that could attract funding.
According to him, the bottom line is to make the participants eventual entrepreneurs, job creators and not job seekers.
He encouraged the participants to make good use of the opportunity given to them by the Federal Government through the NDE and further charged them to bring the knowledge acquired from the training to bear on the various businesses they will run.
Fikpo also assured them that the NDE would put in place a strong monitoring mechanism in the form of business support services after the training.
