Many fresh graduates have registered complaints over inability to secure postgraduate experience opportunities in Nigeria. A Lagos based Engineering Resources Academy has been quietly revolutionising the way we train fresh graduates for jobs through its Young Engineers Internship Training Scheme, writes, isqil Najim.
Internship is no doubt, one of the best ways to equip Young graduates with skill needed to embark on full journey as professional engineers. But the experience of many young people on internship is mixed. While some of them had fulfilling on-site training experience, others have tales of uneventful adventures to write about. The later complained that they didn’t get to do practical works while the journey lasted in the host company.
It is in a bid to bridge this gap that Engineering Resource Academy, ERA led by Engineer OmoLola Adetona step up to address the challenges through her organisation’s Young Engineers Internship Training Scheme.
Five editions has already held with the sixth edition coming up between September 9th and 23rd of this year.
Engineering Resource Academy Equips Young Engineers with Skills to Support their foundational knowledge and assist them toward bridging gap between their classroom knowledge and real life engineering practices.
The organisation also work to address the unsavoury tag of “unemployable gradautes” that has been slammed on some of our fresh graduates, whose only offence is to not have adequate practical training.
The Founder of Engineering Resource Academy, Engr (Dr) Omolola Adetona, a former Chairman of Nigerian Institution of Civil Engineers, NICE Lagos Chapter, and National Vice chairman NICE drew the inspiration for the initiative from her experiences in public seector and leader in professional association. While serving as Chairman, she recommended fresh graduates to some organisations to employ them as site engineers so that they can grow through the rank, but got a very uncomfortable feedback.
“Our members and organisations told us our young engineers were messing up the work, asking if we didn’t train them before sending them to their organisations,” she recalled.
The feedback led her into taking up the challenge to come up with internship training scheme for fresh graduates, where graduates are trained as interns for few weeks at selected engineering sites.
They are taken through the programmes by senior engineers and given opportunity to experience real world of works and equip them to be better at construction and keep developing within the Built Environment.
Some of the specialisations and their areas of consideration are: design engineers, construction supervisors, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, builders, quantity surveyors, architects, structural designers, construction materials QCQA Engineers, and knowledge about Engineering codes and regulations. This and many more are considered and included in the syllabus approved for the training.
In addition to the aforementioned, Soft skills are part of the training along with exposure to new trends of engineering; for instance the use of the Drone technology, tunnelling etc. It also includes personal branding and how to put together professional curriculum vitae (CV) and a cover letter.
ERA goes extra-mike by reaching out to some organisations to employ the trainees as interns and place them under a more senior engineer for six months. Interns are given log books to record their daily activities to be monitored and signed off by the overseeing engineer.
Other opportunity availed the participants is interaction with accomplished senior engineers who visit them to address and share their professional journey. Mentorship and guidance is one of the strong aspect of this training.
Above and many more are why you can’t afford to ignore Engineering Resource Academy’s Young Engineers Internship Training scheme. Whether you are a learner or you run an engineering establishment.
To the industries, this programme offers opportunities to select self motivated, enthusiastic fresh graduates from among the trainees. It saves cost of training fresh graduate from the scratch while giving you job-ready graduates that has gone through months of practical tutoring. Partnering with the ERA is therefore a goal every stakeholders should consider.
I really appreciate for this training, because in the university there no much practical due lack of machine especially we automotive engineering
Thank you for the feedback. Automotive version will definitely come on board soon. we see if we can published firm that is already into that sector soon.