PARTICIPANTS at the just concluded three-day Graduate Internship Employability and Career Development of the Graduate Internship Scheme (GIS) training held at various centres across the country have been urged to maximise the opportunity provided by the training to make their life better.
Aimed at providing the unemployed and underemployed young graduates with the necessary skills to enhance their employability, the GIS was also aimed at preparing them for self-employment, starting their own businesses, becoming job creators and employers of labour, instead of job seekers.
Director of the programme, Mr. Peter Papka highlighted the points during the orientation of interns and firm’s representatives in Awka.
In his welcome address read at the opening ceremony, Papka, who was represented by Mrs. Bala Teresa Jonathan, noted that reactions from individuals and organisations, especially the interns and participating firms, indicate that the scheme has been a catalyst for a wonderful, guided and productive internship experience.
The scheme, the GIS director said, was a social safety net under the defunct SURE-P programme and now under the Ministry of Finance, has been re-invigorated to achieve the very objectives for which it was set up. Some of the objectives, he said, include finding solution to youth unemployment, to which the Federal Government has confirmed its commitment, to contribute to the diversification of the economy and also create more jobs in the process, adding that the GIS has already been contributing to the growth of SMEs and cooperative societies.
More than 1,000 of the interns, Papka said, have already secured either permanent employment mostly from the participating firms that have found them worthy or have started their own businesses using the GIS experience and have the potentials of securing CBN funding.
From the GIS portal, the director informed, 13781 firms and 305,780 graduates have registered to participate in the scheme. In pursuit of the economic diversification objectives of the Federal Government, the GIS has keyed into non-oil sectors of the economy such as ICT in schools, agriculture, export promotion, creative industries, insurance, environmental sanitation and entrepreneurship development. Read Here
Guardian
