Ability is widespread, but chances are scarce

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The first time I noticed it properly was during a conversation with a young man in his final year at the university. He had taught himself to code after lectures. He had built apps that worked. He had freelance clients abroad.

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Yet, he could not get an interview for a junior developer role here at home because he did not have a degree from an institution that recruiters in his sector preferred.

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He was, by every meaningful measure, more skilled than the graduates I had watched walk into the same roles a year earlier.

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He just did not have the pathway.

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For most of my career, I accepted the conventional explanation for the skills gap. Like most people working in technology and business transformation, I had heard employers describe a shortage of skilled workers. Organisations could not fill vacancies. Sectors worried about future shortages. The conclusion always seemed obvious: there were not enough skilled people.

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The longer I worked across digital transformation programmes in the United Kingdom and Sub-Saharan Africa, the less that explanation held up.

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I kept meeting people who had taught themselves entire technical disciplines after work because formal training was out of reach. Graduates whose capability was real, yet whose CVs were invisible. Professionals whose years of experience were dismissed because they had not arrived through the conventional door. The pattern repeated itself across continents.

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The problem, often, was not the absence of talent.

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It was the absence of a pathway.

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This is not a comfortable thing to say in the current Nigerian conversation because the dominant narrative still locates the problem with the talent.

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The Federal Government’s National Talent Export Programme, redesigned in 2025, positions Nigerian youth as a world-class workforce for the global outsourcing industry.

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The Minister of Youth Development told Channels Television’s Youth Forum this month that certificates alone are no longer enough.

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Industry surveys cite Stutern’s finding that only one in 10 Nigerian employers considers graduates adequately skilled.

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The State of the Nigerian Youth Report 2025 estimated that nearly 80 million Nigerian youths are unemployed.

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Almost all of this commentary arrives at the same conclusion: train better, train harder, train differently. The assumption is that if we close the skills gap, the opportunity gap will close behind it.

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That assumption deserves far more scrutiny than it receives.

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Nigeria graduates roughly 1.7 million people from its universities and polytechnics every year. Not all of them lack the skills they need. Many simply do not get the opportunity to apply them. They are squeezed into informal work, roles far below their capabilities, the diaspora, or silence.

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The system loses them not because they were never capable, but because the pathway to put their capabilities to use does not exist for most of them.

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Skills can be taught.

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Pathways are harder to build.

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I have spent most of the past decade observing this same dynamic from two different perspectives.

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In the UK, the people who struggle to access opportunities are often those without professional networks, confidence in unfamiliar professional environments, or exposure to the unwritten rules of a sector.

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In Nigeria, the same people exist in much larger numbers, burdened further by unreliable infrastructure, recruitment systems that screen out unconventional CVs, and the steep cost of every attempt.

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The visible barriers look different.

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The underlying mechanism is the same.

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The economy values skills.

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The economy also values arrival.

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Arrival is what much of the access conversation is really about. Who arrives in the room where the role is being filled? Who arrives with the network that secures the introduction? Who arrives with the cultural fluency that makes them seem like a good fit?

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A young Nigerian who has built three working products on her laptop has the skills. She may not have arrived.

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A self-taught data analyst from Kano whose work would not look out of place in a London consultancy may have the capability. He may never get the interview.

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We tend to call this a skills problem because it is easier to fix the supply side than to redesign the demand side. It is easier to build another boot camp than to ask why our hiring filters continue to produce the same narrow profile of candidates.

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Technology is making this more urgent, not less. Artificial intelligence, automation, and digital transformation are changing how organisations operate faster than any educational system can adapt.

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The people who succeed in this environment will not necessarily be those who were trained best. They will be those who have access to continuous learning, mentorship, project exposure, and the professional environments where skills become practice, and practice becomes credibility.

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Those environments are not evenly distributed. They are concentrated in particular cities, particular companies, and particular networks. The farther one is from those concentrations, the harder it becomes to translate capability into opportunity.

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That is the gap worth closing.

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And training alone cannot close it.

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For too long, the conversation about workforce development has focused on identifying skills shortages.

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It is time to devote equal attention to examining opportunity shortages.

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Talent is distributed remarkably evenly across society.

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Opportunity is not.

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Closing that gap may be the most important workforce challenge of our generation, and we will not achieve it simply by training harder.

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We will achieve it by building the pathways that transform talent into participation.

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Abisola Areola is a data and digital transformation strategist working across the United Kingdom and Sub-Saharan Africa.

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