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TotalEnergies Job Shadow, getting tomorrow’s workforce ready for the future

Millions of young Nigerians graduate every year without any idea of the life in a workplace environment. TotalEnergies Job Shadow contributes to reversing this trend. 

TotalEnergies Job Shadow is an employee engagement activity designed to increase career awareness among senior secondary school students in communities’ across Nigeria. It is a local initiative of Total Nigeria Plc created to help model students' behavior through examples set by the affiliate’s employees who serve as their mentors.  For the past four years since its launch, it has also served as a career guide to students.

A Challenging and Rewarding Selection Process

Working with the technical partners for this project, Kasher Consulting, about 30 students are selected from three secondary schools in the affiliate’s host communities every year. This selection is done by the participating schools and the CSR committee of Total Nigeria Plc using criteria such as academic performance and the class of the students. As expected, students in higher secondary classes are given prominence over those in junior classes. 

Its objective is to expose senior secondary school students to practical real live work environment that will challenge them to aim for excellence and guide them towards a definite career path as they prepare to graduate from high school.

A key feature of this one-day annual event is the pairing of students with employees to enable them experience firsthand, the employee's work environment and occupational skills in practice as they evaluate their own potential career options.

Employee mentors are carefully selected from different disciplines which include human resources, finance, information technology, sales and marketing, safety, legal and engineering.

As part of this program, the students also participate in an essay contest by writing individual essays on their job shadow experience. Contest winners from each school are rewarded with educational tablets preloaded with past examination questions, text books and other academic-related content.  These tablets are also internet enabled and are designed to assist the students with academic research.

A Life-Long Impactful Program

Since 2014, over 90 secondary school students have benefitted from TotalEnergies Job Shadow. . Some of the schools that have participated are Government Day Secondary School, Makera in Kaduna and Dr. Lucas Memorial High school in Lagos.              

This live environment presents students with opportunities to interact and gain firsthand experience with TotalEnergies employees while at their jobs. The realities they experience provide them clearer direction in their career path and a broader perspective beyond the theory been taught in the classroom.  This is because they have the opportunity to interact with various professionals in real terms.  They meet all carders of employees ranging from management to operatives.

Testimonials from students in past editions of the program include “the employees made the experience wonderful. I realized that to enjoy work, you must have passion” (Ikejimba Chiamaka); “today’s experience is an unforgettable one, I really enjoyed it. I learnt a lot concerning customer service” (Igweagu Peace); “It was a good event, I enjoyed watching the processing of the lubricants” (Toheeb Adebayo).

The overall objective of TotalEnergies Job Shadow is to expose young adults to their dream professions in order to inspire them to dream big and become positive change agents in the society.

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