Stutern Graduate Accelerator: How we reached a 90% employment rate

Kehinde Ayanleye
Stutern Stories
Published in
3 min readFeb 7, 2018

“I had been out of a job for six months and wasn’t doing much with my time. It was a period of heavy brooding and introspection and I had been taking online courses in different areas of technology in a bid to figure out a befitting career path for myself. I told myself “Why don’t you try it out, you have nothing to lose. If you get into the program, fine, if you don’t, no pressure”. That seemingly random thought inadvertently led me to make the best decision of my career.” — Olayinka, (SGA 0.1 Candidate)

Last year October, we commenced what we now call Stutern Graduate Accelerator (SGA). We had two presumptions in mind with this initiative. We wanted to know if we could intimately work with employers to train recent graduates that were disconnected from the job market. Secondly, we wanted to know if their freshly acquired skills can get them entry-level jobs within 4 weeks of graduation?

We had a tough time deciding on what field to focus on, but after deploying a survey with employers, we resolved that the UI/UX and Front End Development field is one of those fields that employers are looking to immediately hire for and this will keep growing. And of course, youth employment is a behemoth. However, we were tasked with attracting the best potentials. Within a week of opening the application portal, we gained over 2,000 applicants and we finally arrived at selecting the top 10 candidates that resumed with us. 9 of the trainees graduated and they all got job offers under 4 weeks of graduation from employers like Flutterwave, PocketMoni (ETranzact), Signal Alliance and many more.

Read “My Journey into Tech” by Olasunkanmi

Another critical part of the SGA was the fact that we enrolled 50% male and 50% female candidates. This reflects how much value was placed on having a gender balanced learning environment. It was our way of confronting the prevailing issue of inequality in the technology industry. In addition, this was made possible by Omolara Awoyemi, the conveyor of Girls in Technology, by offering scholarships to the young females that passed our screening stages.

Omolara and the girls (Girls In Technology)

Nadayar from Andela, was an invaluable resource in designing the learning outcome and in recruiting the faculty for this class. Gossy of Beni American University was quick to introduce us to Ian and some employers who would later hire from our pool. Ian became a key part of the brain trust we approached for help whenever we got stuck.

We are excited by the outcome of the first SGA and we are propelled to do a second one in another 2 weeks. We are thrilled to announce the following opportunities:

You can apply as a candidate here. If you would like to be an instructor, you can apply as a UI/UX /Front-End Developer Instructor here.

If you are an employer, let us connect you with our graduates or if you are looking to partner or provide scholarships, please leave us a note here: accelerator[at]stutern[dot]com. Or Call: 09099997645.

For the record: Big thanks to Ugo, our first instructor and to our first graduates; Olayinka, Mobolarinwa, Kemisola, Olasunkanmi, Hakeeb, Olajumoke, Munirat, Mosope and Lekan. We had guests too: Deji of Jobberman, Precious former Designer at Cregital, Simileoluwa from MultiChoice, IC Parklins former Designer at Chocolate City and Early, Designer at CcHub.

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