 Thank you for keeping us company and if you just tuned in, this is why 254 TV, Business Studio, we are talking about technology and employment. I'm speaking to Sufi Mwale, she's the CEO of Employee. Let's hear what she has for rents and what does the situation of COVID-19 have on youth and employment. Good evening. Good evening. It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you for having me. You know, for a very long time, there has been a problem with the youth and employment and almost everyone has tried to come up with a solution for the youth. Our politicians have done it, our parents have done it, friends have done it, but seems we never get to solve our problem. And right now we are speaking of COVID-19, people are back home. Some of them have been laid off without any payment, others have undergone pay cuts and we are struggling as a nation, we are struggling globally. And what would you say the situation will bring the best in terms of job market? Okay, that's a good question. I think what we're experiencing is something that was already predicted to have, to will come to pass. Only that we were associating the changes of the disruption in the labor market maybe to technology and increased adoption of new technologies like artificial intelligence. But the COVID-19 event is what people in our space are calling the accelerant to the future of work. So what we are seeing right now is a situation where people have been laid off. Yes, they don't know where else they can add value or how they can reintegrate back to the workforce. And I think that's one of the solutions that the employer is trying to tackle. Technology has been there for a while now and people have begun working from home. It has been proven it is possible to work from home. What does this mean to prospective employers who are coming up with their businesses or the existing businesses or the enterprise they hold? Because they are people or the employees have proved we can work from home and deliver. How about redundancy? Do we move now from offices to technology completely? It's still a bit too early to have this entire conversation in its fullness. I mean we are seeing a lot of organizations that are actually fully embracing the work from home dogma. Like we've seen Google and also Africa's own Andela who say they are going fully remote first and they are relinquishing all their office spaces. But I think for now employers are just still trying to figure out what to do with their workforce. There are some who've let people go work from home but then they had to recall them. Some who've let people go off in either workforce restructuring and all that but then they are realizing they have manpower gaps again and they are out there looking for people to come back and work for them. So it's still a bit too early to have this conversation. But I think what I would say is it's a critical time for employers. They have to reevaluate their workforce and look at traditional roles and see whether there are so many roles they have to figure out whether they really needed to have in the first place where there are other people who could fill in those roles. Are there roles that they could have worked with part time staff or are there roles that their staff could have worked from home to reduce on total overheads. So I think that's the conversation we'll be having between maybe the next couple of months. All right, now speaking of COVID-19, there are others people now. I think it's a worry now. People are saying I have learnt a lesson. Having one job from my employer, you could say it's a white collar job. They want to have a side hustle and mostly this is what will happen to majority of the people. They will move to this particular space. What will happen if everyone moves to these side houses? How do you balance between the employer and your side hustle and not maybe frustrating your career maybe? I think that's an interesting feature we'll observe. So what we see in other countries, people hold more than one job in developed nations, right? But here we are more used to the eight to five kind of dynamic. But then life is also pushing us out there to try to think of alternative ways to make extra income. The only thing is if you want to get an extra job, you have to be really good within whatever it is that you're doing. Find extra time, whatever it is that you have to figure out how you're going to balance them. Because you don't want, as you are chasing the next thing, to compromise what you already have and it's already stable enough. True. Yes. Now someone who has been laid over such a time, someone who has a career, someone who has been doing well, but they have been maybe laid off because of COVID-19, the employee is saying we can't pay enough. How do you pick yourself from the dust moving forward? Okay, so that's a conversation that I was also just having yesterday. I mean we have people who have been laid off, we have two bands of professionals that ourselves we've looked at, we have entry-level professionals. So maybe someone with less than two years of experience in the marketplace, they are still young, they are still malleable, they still can apply their skills cross-functionally. The bigger challenge lies with people who have been in their space for five years or more, mid-level professionals to senior executives. So you know yourself either as a news anchor or as a reporter or something. So what can you do now that you've been laid off? So these are the people we are advising, they need to find ways to actually reassess their own skills. Find skills that they can apply across functions and find how they can try to offer value across functions. So there is a lot of career introspection that professionals have to go through. They may need to work with career coaches, but definitely that process has to happen before now they move forward. The other thing I was looking at or we were looking at is a result that we were doing over the last couple of weeks and the findings were out by last week. We were seeing that there is a lot of potential for part-time work. So these professionals who have been having very steady jobs, they are now out there in the market. It's taking a lot of time for them to get absorbed by the next employer. Is there a possibility for them to look for other employers with a lesser budget who will be willing to accommodate them maybe for lesser hours? And now this brings me to the question on training and pitching for job market. We have people who feel I can do this, I can do that, but they end up training on one cause, but when it comes to job market, they don't fit. Not because they can't do it, but because of their training. How now do you advise especially the young people on choosing the career path? Okay, I think for our environment or for our market for the longest time, our market has been very linear in terms of how it matches capability to positions. So if you started, what do I use? Engineering, but you feel like you're more artistic. It's very hard for you to convince someone out here that well you can handle another job that's non-engineering. I find it interesting because we deal with a lot of professionals and you will learn by a professional maybe from the U.S. They were maybe a teacher or a nurse and now they are a software developer. Okay, so how really does that happen? So for us what we feel like in this industry what we need is more diverse tools for assessing capability. And I think it's that reason that we build artificial intelligence into our assessment engine. While we are looking at a professional not just from the education and experience perspective, we are looking at them very whole rounded in an all rounded manner. So we are looking at their interests, their temperament, their personality, their aptitude. We are looking at feedback we are getting from referees, their friends and just conglomerating all this together to come up with an overall view of this person's capability. No, I know there are people who get confused on what career path they want to chart in their lives. Especially when someone maybe the high schoolers, someone is from three, from two, they are like I want to be so and so. I want to be like so and so. But choosing that career knowing I am good in this but the job market offers this. How do you advise these people especially them that are confused in coming up with an idea of what they can do by their skills and their talents vis-a-vis what the job market has. Okay. So that's where career professionals come in, expert career coaches come in. They are able to assess someone and they can pick out the salient persona, qualities of this person and advise them on the best career line to pursue. The only challenge with that is that it's not scalable. It cannot address a lot of people at the same time. You know the number of graduates we have or the number of high school kids we have as way too many for a few career professionals to tackle. So I think the best way for this market I know we have a number of other digital tools that are also coming up just like employ. But the best way to scale this kind of personality assessment and mapping that to careers can only be done effectively through technology. Exactly. Now brings me to the point the employ. There are so many platforms where someone applies for a job. You've seen maybe a vacancy for engineer or a doctor or this field. But then you just only upload you CV and other thing. What does employ offer? What are the extra thing that would make me if I'm looking for a job employ would place me where I need to be. So there are two things that employ is doing. Most career platforms in this market they are job requirements centered. So they are measuring some body's capabilities against a job that's already there. There are very few. There's actually no platform other than employ that measures your own capabilities against your own future potential. So I think that's where the beauty is. The reason for that is that most platforms here are paid by the employer to advertise. So the job seeker is never really a customer. Okay. Employ brings in a twist into that dynamic. The job seeker is in just a product. He really is a customer also in this question. The other thing that employ does is that we've actually created a very large network of career professionals. All of them accessible through the website. So beyond the normal technological tools that we provide you where we also provide you with access to career professionals now to have a more personalized approach. And now after maybe I have tried my best to go through your platform. I have not been successful but internally I feel I'm a business person. I'm an entrepreneur. How now do I get where do I get some training if not school? How do I move from independence of the employment to becoming my own employer? How do I manage my business? How do I have my good record keeping? Okay. That is broad. It's a broad question but I'll try. Basically one thing we understand about a job seeker is that they are always a job seeker but then part of them also looks out for entrepreneurship opportunities out there. So all our all our advisory services all our blogs and webinar series we also really try to tackle part of entrepreneurship as a subject but the challenges of getting into entrepreneurship manuvering understanding your clients their needs how to build a product they are really quite broad. I think we'll have to figure out maybe if we realize that it's such a thorough need among our base we'll have to figure out maybe if we can offer better services in terms of entrepreneurship support. Right. Thank you. So if someone wants to reach out for maybe more training and I'm sure in your in your career path you train young people how do does one find you? Okay so someone can get me by through our website obviously it's www.employee.co that is employee is E M P L O I .co or www.employee.co.ke Anybody can also send me a personal email at sofi.employee.co I'm always willing to help. All right. I was trying to to find your profile in my gadget here so you have quite a profile and that's so excellent. We have seen your Tambo Mapeni watching from Ruilo. Thank you so much for watching and back home. Thank you so much for keeping us company trust you have learned something and thank you Sofi as well for coming and I'm sure our audience have learned something this very we had few minutes but you helped me the best you could if you couldn't have gotten any better without you My name is Dereva Hillary she has been my guest Sufi Muales CEO of the E employee maybe you could visit the website and see what they have to offer and maybe you could learn one or two things have yourself a very good night and a blessed a few days of the week remaining keep safe