The Rivers State Ministry of Employment Generation and Empowerment has increased the number of trained persons to 25,000 in its second phase of the RivJobs employability training as against the 900 persons that was trained in August.
The training is a 4-day training which started last week Wednesday and would climax at the close of work today.
Speaking in an interview with newsmen last Wednesday, the Ministry’s Permanent Secretary, Lawson Ikuru, noted that the tremendous increase in number of persons to be trained this month, was as a result of the high number of job seekers found on the state RivJobs’ site,www.Rivvjobs.ng, which currently was within the range of 107,000.
Ikuru stated that the high number of unemployed youths in the state was alarming as most of them lack employability attitude, hence the reason why this training was initiated by His Excellency, the Rivers State Governor, Chief Nyesom Wike in order to train them and get them employable.
He said: “Employability means attitude to job interview and the rest of it, and so we were inspired by that number (107,000) and we decided to target 25,000 persons for this Bootcamp due to the availability of space and we still look forward to target more in subsequent bootcamps, at least to prepare them for employability whenever opportunity presents itself.”
He hinted that the training also includes those who applied for the Rivers State Government’s kind gesture of employing 10,000 teachers, noting that the process of recruitment would comes from the civil service commission which would focus on only those teachers that undergoes this training carried out by the ministry of employment generation and empowerment.
Ikuru hinted further that the post-primary school board and the Universal Basic Education in collaboration with the civil service commission were working on the criteria that would be used to select the 10,000 teachers job, adding that whatever number of teachers they demand would be released to them.
The Permanent Secretary of the ministry emphasized that the training primary objective was to prepare these persons on how to write a good Curriculum Vitae, prepare them to have the boldness to face interview panels, work ethics and attitudes, among others, adding that another phase will come in another couple of months for those who were yet to benefit from it.
He advised those yet to register on the RivJobs platform to be trained to take advantage of this window opportunity opened for them, adding that the facilitators are not just theoretical, but practical too with a whole lot of human resources management experience.
Also speaking one of the facilitators, Tani Ifediora stated that the ministry was not just looking at being employed, but to ensure that the people understand that there were potentials deposited in them to do something that would add value to themselves and society at large.

Susan Serekara-Nwikhana