Entrepreneurial efforts have forced new social, political, and economic changes, holding out the promise of new innovations that will provide any solutions and especially better the lives of the younger generations.
It is against this backdrop that SLOT Academy was established. It is a training school that will equip prospective mobile phone and laptop engineers with the technical know-how to succeed in the mobile telecommunications ecosystem anywhere in the world.
The training usually lasts for six months with a low budget fee of fifty thousand naira (N50,000) against the usual one hundred and fifty thousand naira (N150,000).Any of our programs will provide the necessary skills that will make our students competent and outstanding in today’s technology-driven society.
At the academy, the students go through
Technical Training
Training students on how to accurately and thoroughly face the technical components of their jobs, introducing them to computers, and helping them imbibe basic desktop publishing skills
Leadership and Entrepreneurship
Leadership and entrepreneurship are compulsory parts of our training philosophy to imbue our students with ethical skills and to help hone their creativity.
Engineering
Students are trained intensively on hardware and software training for phones, tablets, and related electronic devices. Fault detection and troubleshooting are also part of our training courses.
The goals of the academy include, but are not limited to:
• Train Nigerian youth with skills to fix, repair, and refurbish mobile devices and PCs.
• Empowering youth to be entrepreneurs in one of the most viable and fastest-growing business sectors in Nigeria’s ICT
• To make the average Nigerian youth less dependent on government and white collar jobs and more self-employed.
According to Mr. Nnamdi Ezeigbo, Chairman Ezeigbo, Slot Foundation, the mother company of Slot Academy, the Academy, is a system that will help create more jobs and help more people become self-employed. It is a huge success, and it is a typical example of what the apprenticeship model can do.
“Having benefited from the apprenticeship business model, I have been able to replicate this in my company by introducing Slot Academy. At Slot Academy, we adopted the apprenticeship system. My foundation, The Ezeigbo Slot Foundation, which is the company’s CSR, introduced the Slot Academy 25 years ago. The Slot Academy organizes a vocational training program for six months, during which young people acquire the necessary engineering skills required by the telecommunications industry, specifically the phone companies. By young people, I mean people between the ages of 18 and 35. Over 2,000 young people have gone through our system. About 60 percent of these are working with us, and some are working with our competitors. Most of the mobile phone engineering service companies today have graduates from our scholarship program and our academy. A reasonable percentage of them are also running their businesses,” he added.
The academy had collaborated with some states in Nigeria. Through the Lagos State Technical and Vocational Education Board (LASVEB), it collaborates to train youths who benefit from a scholarship program that is provided in partnership with GIZ, a German company interested in vocational training for Nigerians. The Academy also works with the governments of Edo and Abia states. Apart from these, it has partnered with some organizations, such as Ikeja Electric, to extend this scholarship to Nigerian youths.
