Five Reasons why you should NOT work at ALX

As an entrepreneur, I’m constantly searching for talent. Over the years, the various organizations I’ve founded have hired almost a thousand people. We will likely hire thousands more as we grow. Thankfully, most of the people we hire turn out well. Sadly, a fraction does not.

I find it personally heartbreaking whenever someone we hire does not succeed. From our side as the employer, the failure means several wasted months searching for that person, doing interviews, reference checks, assessments, onboarding, etc. For the person leaving us, they may have given up a great job elsewhere or moved their entire family halfway around the world to join us. They might struggle for a few months to find their next job. It truly makes me sad when it does not work out. No one benefits from this situation.

As I reflect on those hires that do NOT work out, I’m realizing that one of the biggest issues that prevents people from succeeding with us is actually not their skills. It is often a misalignment between their personal values and beliefs and those of our organization.

Most companies tell prospective employees all the reasons why they should work there. But they don’t tell people why they might not want to work there.

Today I want to change that. For anyone considering joining us, here are five reasons you should NOT apply for (or accept) a job offer at ALX — our next-generation lifelong leadership development platform.

1. You don’t want to scale

From our inception, we set an audacious goal: to develop 3 million transformative leaders for Africa by 2035. We originally thought we could achieve this goal by opening 25 university campuses with 10,000 students each over several decades. We now realize that we need a different vehicle for developing talent that is not a university (see next point), and that we need more sites with fewer students in each. Whether we end up with 25 sites, 50 sites, or 200 sites is beside the point. The point is we need a large-scale solution to a large-scale problem.

We are not building a tiny liberal arts college with 1,800 students or even one university campus with 20,000 students. We want to develop 3 million leaders for Africa. And we need to do this by 2035 (which is less than 6,000 days from now) because that’s when Africa will have the largest workforce in the world (one billion people).

We believe that organizations that scale well actually enhance their quality as they scale. Quality gets better, not worse, with size.

Just look at Emirates Airlines, Apple, Google and Four Seasons Hotels. The bigger they got, the better the quality of their products (just think Iphone 1 vs Iphone 10). Similarly, we’re going to scale and increase our quality at the same time. So if you are frightened of scale, or you do not believe there are enough talented Africans (out of a billion people on this continent) to meet our scale ambitions, or do not believe that quality can get better — not worse — with scale, then it is very likely that you will have a hard time aligning yourself with what we’re doing.

2. You want to build something conventional

We believe that existing models for developing talent around the world are broken. We need to re-imagine a new model that is faster, cheaper, higher quality, and more in line with the needs of the future. For example, our model is student-driven (i.e. our students learn by themselves and from their peers) vs professor-led. We prefer to assess our students on real-world projects vs exams.

We encourage our students to personalize their learning by declaring "missions" around problems they want to solve (and to curate their own interdisciplinary learning around the problems they are passionate about) vs choosing academic majors from a menu we give them.

We measure our success by whether our graduates become problem-solvers who "learn how to learn" and can reinvent themselves as the world changes vs whether they remember the facts and figures from their academic degree. We do not believe in grades (we believe they rob you of learning) and instead believe in feedback. We engage deeply with employers (our students have a 4-month mandatory internship each year) to ensure we are producing skills employers want. We focus on lifelong learning — i.e. we want people to never "graduate" from ALX and instead keep coming back for continuous learning as they mature and as the world changes. Lastly, we believe that giving young people a powerful network, work experience, and 21st century skills (like collaboration, leadership, entrepreneurship, data analysis, critical thinking, communication, and project management) is as important as giving them academic theory.

When we select talent, we focus less on their national exam results or SAT scores and instead look for attributes that make great leaders and entrepreneurs — traits like perseverance, passion, agility, resilience and imagination. We do not measure our success by the research our faculty publish (which is what traditional university rankings are mostly based on) but rather by the impact our graduates have on society, the jobs they create as entrepreneurs, the transformative national policies they implement and feedback we get from employers.

Our institution has a very clear purpose — to create entrepreneurial leaders, not just to educate for education’s sake.

As such, academics is a means to that end, not the end in itself. Ultimately, we want to disrupt — in a major way — existing models of teaching and learning. If any of the statements above make you uncomfortable, then again, it is unlikely you will enjoy your time and feel fulfilled at ALX.

3. You think "revenue" is a dirty word

Running such a large-scale enterprise as ALX costs millions (and eventually billions) of dollars each year. As such, we cannot rely on government or donors to keep our mission alive. We must be able to control our own destiny, and not "beg" for a living.

We have a 100-year mission. There is no way we can last that long, and reach the scale we envision without generating our own revenue. Revenue drives impact. Period. It gives us the resources we need to develop millions of young Africans. So, if you believe that revenue is a "dirty word" and that education is something that no one should pay for, that the private sector is bad, and that corporations are bad, you will likely be frustrated at ALX.

Don’t get us wrong, we fundamentally believe that education should be accessible to all.

Unfortunately, the continent cannot afford to wait for governments to get their act together. We have to leverage private sector financing as well.

If you believe that only governments and donors should pay for education and that students, graduates, and families should not contribute anything towards their education, then you will be troubled by our model. At ALX, we have a "pay it forward" subscription model, whereby students do not pay anything upfront to access our training programs. Instead, once our graduates are successful (defined as earning income), they have to pay a small monthly subscription of roughly $50/month for 5-10 years). If they are not employed in any given month, they do not pay anything back to ALX. In this way, one generation of graduates funds the next generation, making us self-sustaining and at the same time extremely accessible to young people in Africa. If this really troubles you, then you should really reconsider whether this is the place for you.

4. You want a "safe bet"

There is no other way to say this: there is a chance that what we are doing could fail.

No one has ever built an organization to develop 3 million African leaders in less than 6,000 days. There is no blueprint. We’re learning as we go along. Many of the innovations we attempt will not work. The good news is that in our last 16 years as the African Leadership Group, we have never missed payroll. But, the fact remains that we are a fragile start-up, not a "safe bet." We could run out of money or be forced to cut costs drastically to survive.

We are a community that would rather fail trying to achieve something extraordinary than succeed at something ordinary.

If that mindset freaks you out and you want a safe, guaranteed job for life, with a very clear pathway, then ALX may not be the place for you.

5. You don’t want to build something global

The low-cost, high-quality, large-scale disruptive model we have pioneered at ALX is game-changing, not only for Africa but for the whole world. So, while we are proud of our African roots, we see ourselves as a global innovation born in Africa. Just like the first heart transplant in the world (which was done in South Africa), or Nando's (the fast-food chain), we will eventually transplant our model around the world.

Our students engage with global content from the world’s best universities (much of which is now freely accessible online) and they will access global research databases as they pursue their personalized "missions." While we will create African content and case studies to add to our students’ learning content, we don’t have the time — nor the money — to create only African content or technology from scratch. We must be open to adopting relevant technologies and ideas from the rest of the world (and leaving behind the ones that are not relevant).

We seek the world’s top talent, so we will continue hiring staff from all over the world, not just from Africa.

Our investors, advisors, board members and academic partners come from all over the world. We engage globally because we believe that Africa cannot develop in a vacuum. Its future leaders need to think globally and leverage global relationships to attract investment, ideas, and trade to Africa. If that sentiment really troubles you, then please reconsider your plans to work with ALX.

There are a few other reasons you might not want to work at ALX. Talk to our staff to find out more. For example, another important reason not to join us is if you want perfect work/life balance. That is not something you’ll likely get in the early years of our bold, disruptive, ambitious start up. You’re going to have to work really, really hard and put in long hours.

But for now, I wanted to share some of the more common misalignments with the whole world in the hope that fewer people will join us who are not aligned with our beliefs and values.

Please reflect carefully on the five reasons outlined here about why you should NOT work with us. If you checked “NO” to all of the above and are excited about rethinking how talent is developed in the 21st century, then we would love to hear from you. Otherwise, we wish you well in your endeavors and hope this letter helped you avoid making a decision you will later regret.