On Ernst & Young, Accenture and Nigeria

My guess is that most of us, by now, are familiar with Ernst & Young's decision to relegate the degree to the background when recruiting talent. Why not anyway? Many people around the world keep questioning the need for [expensive] formal education and they have tried to establish its correlation with the guarantee of a better life. While some may argue in favor, a lot of people still believe higher education is a scam and that it does not always guarantee that fantasy life it makes us believe it will grant us.

So why did Ernst and Young decide to abandon traditional degrees?

If you took the time to notice, you would realize that the number of college grads being churned out every year dwarfs, by far, what that number was only about a decade ago. This brings a lot of things to mind but drawing the easy correlation to population growth is far from it. Here are two questions for this fact finding mission

1. For students - Is formal education now just a ritual? 
2. For educators - For profit? ‘Let My People Go’ so new ones can come in with thousands of dollars for tuition?

On the other hand, if you look around you, its easy to realize that it is a world of millennials - people who are upwardly mobile and constantly improving themselves on the go. Incase we all forgot, education is not only a formal expedition. We tend to forget that there is an informal side to education and one of the reasons we quickly forget that lies in ads by profit driven educators who, on a yearly basis, succeed in infiltrating our heads and minds, telling us about their institutions, why it must be theirs and why the only way to achieve a purpose driven life is to shell out thousands of dollars to get schooled by their people who got schooled by some other people who also got schooled somewhere along the line. While the rant about formal education is a post for another day, I am sure Ernst & Young would have realized, somewhere along the line, that more and more of the talent they seek are on-the-go learners empowered by the internet.

I have an interesting find to the concept of formal education though. Educational degrees is a concept set up to help employers easily sieve through talent/applications during the hiring process. But hey, if Ernst & Young is abandoning these degrees to focus more on skilled and aptitude tests, then, it is possible that, in no time, other mega corporations will join the trend, and if that happens, the result wouldn't be different from what we all would have been running away from, and that is, we would have only witnessed succeeded in shift ing from idolizing traditional college degrees to to idolizing skilled certificates (skilled degrees, lol, another form of formal education).  

But are the millennials also influencing Accenture into abandoning yearly performance reviews? If you read the article, you would have found that the answer is yes. Millennials have completely transformed the way businesses hire talent and operate but a fundamental question abounds. Is Africa jumping on this trend to help stir the continent to prosperity?

In Nigeria, for instance, a recent survey of the best companies to work for revealed that 80% of the top 10 companies in the list of 100 were established within the same time the respondents surveyed were born. A quick look through the entire list - out of just 335 surveyed companies - suggests the same trend (this says a lot about other companies established pre 1980, their management structure and corporate culture. Anti millennial revolution?). The survey which reveals that more and more millennials are being injected into the workforce in Nigeria, also does reveal that millennials agree to have little tolerance for companies that, altogether, do not meet the millennial demand on corporate culture evident in things like company prestige, work-life balance and self fulfillment. 

Although the survey didn't delve deep into the corporate cultures at the surveyed companies, it is no doubt an eye opener to businesses in Nigeria and other African countries on the need to re-evaluate their corporate cultures and how they do business in general in order to achieve sustainability and to be able to compete globally in the future just as Ernst & Young and Accenture realized.

The APC led Nigerian government preaches the message of change. Will Nigerian businesses also lead the change charge in Africa? Because the truth is, millennials are the energetic and spontaneous young people who reinvented the concept of efficiency and I think Africa should pay attention.

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