By Chidi Favour
The Weight of ‘What’s Next?’
There is this non existent friend named Jide; let me tell you about Jide because the lifestyle of Jide could be wrapped up in your daily action and you may never know. Here is Jide’s story.
Jide did not need anyone to tell him that graduation was close. He could feel it in the way lectures now sounded like echoes of a chapter already ending, in the way conversations among friends kept circling back to one question nobody seemed ready to answer. What comes next.
Indeed, Jide was not at the Game Changers Summit 2.0 held at the University of Benin, Ekewan Campus, on 22nd and 23rd May 2026. But if he had been there, perhaps Dr Sola Okunkpolor would have spoken directly to the quiet anxiety he had been carrying for months.
She began with a sentence that did not feel gentle, yet felt true. “Whatever degree you come out with is useless if you do not have the right information.” For a moment, the room must have shifted uncomfortably. It sounded like a quiet dismissal of years spent in lecture halls, libraries, and late night reading.
But she did not leave it there. Almost immediately, she balanced it with another reality. Employers still look at class of degree. In that moment, she was not contradicting herself, she was revealing the tension students live with every day.
According to her, most hiring decisions begin with three things: age, class of degree, and keywords. The last one, she explained, is no longer confined to paper documents. It is shaped by what people find when they search you online. Your digital presence, she implied, is now part of your identity, whether you manage it or not.
Earlier in the programme, Dr Benjamin Ebede, the convener of the summit, had asked a student to present her CV. She hesitated. She did not have one ready. He gently corrected her thinking.
A CV, he said, is no longer just a document you write and submit. It is also your online presence, your footprint, your consistency, your visibility. In today’s world, even social media can speak on your behalf, sometimes louder than you expect.
Then Dr Okunkpolor added a line that stayed in the room like a proverb. “What you are looking for in Sokoto is in your sokóto.” It carried a simple but uncomfortable truth. Sometimes, what people search for far away is already within reach, already within them, already waiting to be noticed.
She went further to challenge how young people think about work. “The job you seek in the real world is the job you create,” she said. The world, she explained, is not waiting for degrees. It is waiting for solutions. It is waiting for people who can see problems and respond with something useful.
One of the mistakes many students make, she added, is waiting for urgency before learning something new. Skills should not be reactionary. They should be prepared in advance. In her words, it is better to say you already have a skill you are not yet using than to realise you need one you never took time to learn.
Read also: MIVA Open University: Revolutionising Education Through Technology and Innovation
Experience, she insisted, often carries more weight than certificates. A certificate may open the door, but experience determines whether you stay in the room. To make her point clearer, she painted a simple picture.
A graduate returns years after leaving school and is asked a simple question: what have you been doing since then? If there is no answer backed by growth or effort, the certificate begins to lose its influence.
But she did not stop at skills and certificates. She spoke about something more human, something often overlooked. Relationships. The people you meet, the connections you nurture, and the bridges you choose to build or burn. “Make your life easier by building bridges, not burning them,” she said.
Yet she also reminded the students that communication is what sustains those bridges. Without it, even good intentions collapse.
She added a sobering thought. Collective decisions may feel shared in the moment, but consequences are always personal. In the end, no crowd will live your life for you.
During the question and answer session, a graduate stood up with a familiar concern. He had many interests and felt unsure about which direction to follow.
She did not rush him, instead, she encouraged patience with self discovery. Growth, she suggested, often reveals direction over time. She also warned against living with a victim mindset, because it quietly limits what a person believes is possible.
Currently, artificial intelligence is gradually reshaping work, she pointed students towards skills that still hold value. Copywriting, video editing and creative digital skills that combine human thought with technology rather than competing against it.
As the event came to a close, one question remained hanging in the air. What are the monetisable skills that can be learned now, skills that are not already overcrowded, skills that still hold space for growth in an unpredictable future?
That question was not only for the hall at the University of Benin. It was for Jide too and for every final year student sitting quietly with a wristwatch, wondering what the future is trying to ask of them.
