As students or young adults in our country, like ours, Nigeria, one of the best decisions you can make in your life or have your parents make while growing up is to go and learn a skill, be it a practical or a soft skill, and that's because it'll greatly ease our journey in life and come through to help us in the future. Although I understand the fact that not everyone will thrive with skills, and neither will everyone work in that field, as academic certificates on their own can bring about success in life, I'll still encourage skills acquisition, and below I'll explain why.
You see, for many years I've always encouraged students and young people to learn skills, and my stand on this was brooded not just by experience while growing up, but also by the situations of things in our society today. We must understand that the world isn't as it was several years ago, where all school graduates have jobs waiting for them immediately after they graduate from the university. Nowadays, our population and total graduates per year have exceeded the numbers of available jobs, and this has led to many graduates having their certificates irrelevant due to lack of employment. During such a period, a student with a skill could easily just delve into that to make ends meet, whole those with none have to settle for mania jobs or start learning a skill in a time where they ought to be carrying their own responsibility.
With what I stated above, you and I can see why it's essential for everyone to possess skills, when I graduated from secondary I wanted to learn a skills, but my parents were against it, but during my university days, when I had my liberty, I learnt a skills and became if the passion I had for that skills, it didn't affect my academic performance, so my advice is that we should also find our areas of interest and learn a skills in it can help us cut some slack for our parents during our school days, we can make money from that skill and use it to attend to some of our needs and when we graduate we can even establish ourselves in that field before we get a white collar job, rather that waiting endlessly for employment with ridiculous pay.
While I said young people should be encouraged to learn a skills, I don't think it should be made compulsory for everyone, let people decide for themselves, after all, not everyone will eventually work in their skills area, some will be a white collar job, white others will do something entirely different, I learn a skills and it was helpful to me during my school days, till date I still find it useful, because whenever I feel like, I still sew my own clothes to save cost of paying a professional to do it, since I myself knows how to sew and have a sewing machine.
All photos are generated using ChatGpt.
