LABOUR NDE trains 15,343 in vocational skills – Obayan

The National Directorate of Employment (NDE) has over a period of one year trained 15,343 persons in vocational, agricultural and entrepreneurial skills. The Acting Director-General of the directorate, Mr Olakunle Obayan, stated this at the NDE special day at the 2017 edition of the Enugu International Trade Fair.

He said, “We have reasons to rejoice in the strength of our four core programmes namely: Vocational Skills Development (VSD), Small Scale Enterprises (SSE), Rural Employment Promotion (REP) and Special Public Works (SPW ) Programmes.”

The director- general noted that the faithful implementations of the directorate`s employment creation programmes had to a reasonable extent, reduced the level of despair and disillusionment associated with unemployment in Nigeria.

“The realities of economic recession and evidences of break throughs emanating from self-employment initiatives have reinforced our belief in the efficacy of skills acquisition training, which globally, has demystified the seemingly intractable challenges of unemployment and poverty,’’he said.

Obayan said to further deepen the effectiveness of its employment creation strategies, the NDE after completing the framework for the online registration of unemployed persons in Nigeria had commenced the actual registration of the unemployed nationwide.

“I am glad to inform this august gathering that a work-station is functional at the NDE stand at this fair from where any unemployed person can register. Other Nigerians can avail themselves of this service by logging on to www.jobsforall.ng. “We consider this a very critical input into the process of designing, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of all programmes and schemes of the directorate. Unemployed Nigerians are expected to register on the portal which has the capacity to serve a job exchange linking employers and jobseekers having fully been hosted,” he said.