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IT Career in Nigeria

Learn how to find your dream IT job in Nigeria

The world has had to rely a lot on IT in recent months to be able to sustain a good level of economic and government activities. So enquiries about IT jobs in Nigeria has increased a lot. Also, many students and recent graduates have been learning about IT career in Nigeria because everyone knows that there will be many future opportunities for IT specialists in Nigeria in future. Make no mistakes, the post-corona world will continue to practice significant some social distancing, and this will create more job opportunities in the IT and telecom industries.

The top job websites in Nigeria are also focusing a lot on IT in recent times because even small companies are hiring IT specialists in order to enhance their operations through technology. Through better use of IT, financial, entertainment, and medical practices are growing their businesses across the world. In the same vein, Nigerian companies have significantly increased their use of IT in recent months and this will remain the norm for a long time. According to the #1 IT recruitment agency in Nigeria – Delon Jobs, despite the looming economic crisis, IT jobs in the last five years in Nigeria will likely double within the next five years when compared with the last five years. This is because even many big companies will downsize a lot in terms of human resources and will tend to rely more on technology to get their work done. Relying more on technologies mean that such companies will have to recruit more IT specialists and IT recruitment in Nigeria may be a beneficial service to them.

Before I continue with my article, I like to answer a popular question in many people’s minds related to the highest paying IT jobs in Nigeria through a simple infographic estimate of the top 15 highest paying IT jobs in Nigeria as published by Nigeria’s top IT recruitment company – Delon Jobs.

 

Highest Paying IT Jobs in Nigeria

If you have carefully gone through the infographic above about the top paying IT jobs in Nigeria, you would have learnt a little about fifteen out of the several fields of IT jobs in Nigeria today. One general area that will also grow in Nigeria within the next 5 years is online jobs in Nigeria. And I have continued to encourage people to position themselves for many upcoming online jobs in Nigeria. If you are student in Nigeria, you can watch a video that provides very good tutorial about how to get online jobs in Nigeria as a student.

 

IT Jobs in Lagos

Software development is perhaps the most sought-after category of jobs in the IT industry in Nigeria, especially because there is higher demand for them than any of the other high-paying IT jobs in Nigeria. Employers are paying high salaries because there is scarcity of experienced software developers in the country. So whenever software developer jobs in Nigeria positions are posted on job portals, the positions do not get filled up quickly except the new employer is willing to pay a decent amount. This industry is therefore currently a seller’s market.

If you visit the #1 job website for IT jobs in Nigeria, you will always see software developer positions and that clearly shows there is a growing need that is not sufficiently matched with adequate supply at the moment.

There are many types of jobs associated with software development. I will discuss a few of them as follows.

UI UX Designer Jobs in Nigeria

User Interface and User Experience (UI/UX) job is the first type I like to talk about. It is a very uncommon type of job in the software development industry in Nigeria because the industry is not currently putting a lot of value on it. The mistake they make however is that most companies end up spending more time and money fixing poorly created software because they did not spend adequate time on the initial UI/UX design before the development team started coding. No matter how gifted and experienced your software coding team is, they will always run into problems if the UI/UX was not perfectly done at the beginning.

UI/UX requires a lot of collaboration with the customer and the challenge is that some customers do not even want to exercise adequate patience to go through the process with the software development company. They always want the software developers to start coding quickly in order to get the product ready on time. But it is the responsibility of the software development company to explain in detail to the customer the need for proper UI/UX work before coding. I predict that there will be many new job opportunities for UI/UX designers in Nigeria in the next five years.

Quality Assurance Jobs in Nigeria

Quality Assurance (QA) engineers are also not often talked about in the Nigeria software development industry. Yet it is perhaps one of the major reasons why software products from the West tend to be less devoid of problems than local software products. Local software products in Nigeria will become much more successful when QA is taking more seriously. So if you are a recent engineering graduate that loves coding but do not really have the flair or skills in coding, QA is a good area to consider as there will be more jobs related to QA in the next few years.

Cyber Security Jobs in Nigeria

A cyber security engineer creates and executes secure network solution against cyber-attacks and hackers. It is a rapidly growing field in Nigeria’s financial sector, but there will be growing needs for cyber security engineers in government, oil & gas, online marketplace, as well as insurance in the next few years. Cyber security experts are still very few in Nigeria, but it is a good area to explore as a student or recent graduate. It will continue to be a high-paying job in Nigeria.

Software Developer Jobs in Nigeria

Software development today includes mobile app developers, web app developers, and desktop app developers. But because of the advent of cloud computing and massive growth of mobile technologies across the world, the need for mobile and web developers have increased across the world. So people talk more about mobile and web development in many companies. But because many companies in Nigeria need internal software developers to help with several customization work on their off-the-shelf software, there will continue to be many jobs for core software developers in Nigeria for the next five years.

Cloud and infrastructure engineers now work closely with software developers to handle the infrastructure end of development. They help to link operations with the remote hardware. Then we have the data engineers (sometimes called data scientists) who can venture in several sub-areas including big data, artificial intelligence, etc.

Project Manager Jobs in Nigeria

Project managers, scrum masters, product managers, product owners, agile coach and software development managers are management or business-related positions associated with software development. They perform best when they have technical background but there are also many efficient managers without technical background.

Moving away from software development, we have network engineers, server administer, IT support engineer, and power engineers, among others. Unlike the positions I earlier described, these are not new positions in Nigeria. They may not be in high demand like the new ones described above within the next five years, they will continue to be highly relevant.

Getting IT Jobs in Nigeria

So what do we have to do to produce adequate number of IT specialists that will be available to fill up the new IT jobs in Nigeria that will be available over the next five years? Acquiring IT skills and education used to very expensive and exclusive, but that is no longer the case. You do not need to go to a top public university or an expensive private university in order to become an expert in any IT field of your choice.

I was interviewing several people recently for a senior software engineer position, and the top two candidates were people that had HND in computer science. Ordinarily, they would have been disqualified from the hiring process because the requirement was bachelor’s degree, but because we decided not to screen HND holders out, we found them. Every company providing top IT recruitment service in Nigeria will not screen IT candidates based on the university or polytechnic you attended because they know that does not play any role at this time. They focus on your skills and ability to adapt to the new employer’s work environment.

Internship Jobs in Nigeria

If you are interested in the IT industry as a student, you should spend time reading a lot about the different fields of IT, learn a lot about them, evaluate them in terms of job opportunities in Nigeria and your personal academic ability. In order to determine what IT fields are hiring a lot in Nigeria at the moment, you can regularly visit the top job portal for IT jobs in Lagos – Delon Jobs to look for IT jobs as if you are ready for the employment market. While searching for different types of IT jobs, you will see several different types of IT jobs, including some of the ones I described earlier. You should study all those job types and try to narrow down to your top three or five which you may end up building your career plan around in future.

I like to provide some advice to recent graduates of IT-related courses in Nigeria who have very little skills in IT but strongly desire to find IT jobs in Nigeria. First of all, you should do consider my earlier advice in the earlier part of this article where I was addressing students who are interested in pursuing IT career in Nigeria. If you are a recent graduate of IT or engineering in Nigeria with little experience, I am assuming that you did internship during your school program and NYSC after school but you were not fortunate to get the kind of core IT experience that you desire.

My first advice is to seek internship opportunity with companies at zero or little pay. I remember many years ago I worked at a newly formed company in Lekki. It was owned by some of Nigerian banks. There was an electrical engineering graduate who had looked for job for a few years without getting. Suddenly he met the company’s IT manager and appealed for an internship position to give him a chance to learn. The IT manager initially declined, saying the company did not have a policy of hiring post-NYSC people as interns but after enormous persuasion from other people, he sought management approval and the engineer got the job. The man (the electrical engineering graduate) worked for a few years, learnt a lot, got confirmed as a full-time IT specialist and he is currently working in the UK as an IT specialist.

If you do not get an internship opportunity, you can start learning some skills by yourself. Once you determine one or two areas that you are mostly interested in, you should approach friends or family in those areas and plead for books, helpful information, and software from them. You can also appeal for practical lessons from them. I have deliberately mentioned friends and family because I anticipate that these will be people that would not mind providing free assistance to you.

The last example is good for people that can get training sponsorship. If you have a parent or guardian that can sponsor you for IT training, please take advantage of the opportunity and enroll yourself at good IT training institutes in Nigeria. Devout about six to twelve months to learn a lot and get fully prepared for the employment market. Once you have developed some good skills, you can then start looking for IT jobs in Nigeria.

Npower Jobs in Nigeria

Let us talk about government role a bit. At this corona period, government has been doing a lot to create jobs through the Npower program, but according to a tribune article which discusses how governments can reduce unemployment in Nigeria, the federal and state governments must create deliberate policy incentives to encourage companies to keep as many jobs as possible during this corona crisis. The governments should also handle the recently approved N2.3 trillion stimulus put together by the Economic Sustainability Committee (ESC) assembled by President Muhammadu Buhari with the best possible transparency and integrity. The state governments also have to improve its COVID-19 palliative selection and distribution strategies across Nigeria.

As we talk about IT jobs in Nigeria, Npower jobs and government efforts to enhance employment across the country, it is important for students, Pre-NYSC, NYSC and recent graduates to also sharpen their job hunting skills in Nigeria in order to successfully compete for opportunities, whether it is private-driven or government-led. According to an article from Nigeria’s top newspaper, the #1 job site in Nigeria provides free weekly live webinars to teach Nigerian students, Pre-NYSC, NYSC and recent graduates about finding jobs in Nigeria and career development. This is a really great value that people should take advantage of. Past episodes of their live webinar on finding jobs in Nigeria is available here on youtube.

Nigeria Jobs on Linkedin

One other important point to discuss is that Nigerians can also access about many IT jobs in Nigeria on linkedin. Linkedin offers tremendous opportunities for job seekers to connect with employers, but many IT job seekers do not use it effectively. If you are an IT professional with great interests in working for a big Nigerian company called ABC, you should not wait until you find a linkedin job post from ABC before reaching out to people working in ABC. You should try to find connections from company ABC so that you already have friends there before a job opportunity comes up. Also, ensure you are following the company on linkedin so that you get their news posts on time.

Whenever you find an IT job posted on linkedin, it is a good idea to try to check if you have any 1st level or 2nd level connection in the company to try to seek referral opportunities or ask important questions about the job opening before applying. Linkedin is a very powerful tool and you should take time to learn all about how to maximize its use in your search for good IT jobs in Nigeria. In recent years, the best job website in Nigeria on linkedin does a good job posting hundreds of new Nigeria jobs on linkedin every week, and that makes it easier for people to see diverse types of jobs while they remain on linkedin.

Online Jobs in Nigeria

Finally, since I talked briefly about online jobs earlier, I like to also talk about how Nigerians can provide online services in Nigeria. One industry that has been growing a lot in recent years in Nigeria is the fashion design industry. The corona crisis will continue to impact the industry negatively but professionals in the industry can still be making use of the #1 classifieds ads website for fashion designer in Nigeria to showcase their products free of charge since many people across the country can see the adverts. This will help them to continue to promote their brand even while business is down. When the world fully reopens, it will be easier for them to connect with people. People selling clothing can also consider putting their ads on top classifieds to sell clothing online in Nigeria. IT specialists who do not have full-time positions or are not interested in full-time jobs can pursue freelancing jobs, using local classifieds in Nigeria and other foreign websites like upwork, toptal, and fiverr.

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