Every year, thousands of students graduate to enter the job market with little to no skills at all thus end up struggling to fit into the market. Despite the skills set acquired at school, upskilling is important for the graduates.
The future workforce comprises of the millennials and the Generation Z’s who are now steadily entering the job market as the baby boomers exit. The early boomers started exiting first in 2011 up to now giving room for new minds to take up their positions but still, the skills gap sets them apart.
Generally, you will find out that skills acquired at school are by far different than the employability skills that employers require. Due to this skills gap, most young people miss out on many opportunities when it comes to employment. We pride ourselves in providing training, especially in blogging to offer these young people employability skills.
Upskilling is a powerful force against the rapid pace of automation impacting nearly all industries. According to a report by Capgemini Research Institute, Employees who benefit from upskilling are able to better leverage automation tools but more importantly move to more value-added activities, thus driving more output for the organization.
While upskilling is significant for mostly the employed, if offered to students it will impact their growth and present them to better opportunities when seeking for employment.
Many major organizations are already investing in these types of upskilling programs. For example, Amazon recently announced “Upskilling 2025” initiative pledges to spend $700 million on upskilling programs to help more employees gain expertise in areas like machine learning and software engineering.
As part of our mandate to train bloggers, so far, we have trained bloggers on selected topics and areas especially social media and blogging to new bloggers while giving re-skilling opportunities for experienced bloggers to refresh on their skills and blog better.
As at now, we have carried out over 30 pieces of training with bloggers in Nairobi in different areas ranging from the basics of blogging, advanced blogging, use of social media tools, how to make money online, law and the internet as well as online security.
We have supported upcoming bloggers in several counties with expert knowledge and networking opportunities including trainings in social media marketing and blogging.
The trainings target the youth with a purpose to empower them and give them a chance to learn and acquire new skills to help them in the future.
We have also had introductory pieces of training and talks in eight counties and major universities in Kenya. Beyond that, we plan to cover other counties such as Kilifi, Eldoret, Embu, Baringo, Kakamega among others. All these pieces of training are aimed at encouraging youth to create content in their different areas of interest and enable them to be able to make a living through their blogs.
This year, we opened applications for the 2020 Digital Literacy and Fake News Virtual Training. Targeting 75 youth across three counties in the country.
The training aims at creating awareness and stimulating conversations targeting the youth on governance issues such as anti-corruption, accountability, elections, fake news, digital rights and media freedoms.
The applications for the training closed on Thursday 25th June 2020 but you can follow our pages to be posted for the next training or send an email to training@bake.or.ke