Sénamé Agbossou

The Factory at the Wrong Address

Imagine a car manufacturer blaming steel mills because the steel “isn’t car-ready.”

“Why aren’t you sending us doors and engines?” they demand. “All you give us is raw metal. Don’t you understand what we need?”

The steel mill executives would stare in disbelief. “We make steel. You make cars. That’s… how manufacturing works.”

Absurd, right?

Yet this is exactly what we do with talent.

We expect universities to deliver fully-formed employees: people who can navigate our specific systems, use our proprietary tools, meet our unique standards. When they send us smart, educated people who need development, we throw up our hands and declare a “skills crisis.”

We’ve been looking for the employability factory at the university address.

But it’s been inside our companies all along.

The Paradox Hiding in Plain Sight

Right now, in Silicon Valley, a tech company is rejecting 200 resumes because “no one has the right skills.” Three blocks away, a computer science graduate with a 3.8 Grade Point Average (Excellent) can’t get an interview.

In Berlin, manufacturers are warning of economic collapse due to “talent shortages.” Meanwhile, youth unemployment across Europe sits at 14%.

In Lagos, Nairobi, and São Paulo, the story repeats: companies can’t find talent. Graduates can’t find work. Everyone blames everyone else.

We call this a “skills gap.” But what if we’ve been measuring the wrong gap all along?

The Lie We Tell Ourselves

Here’s the comfortable story we’ve agreed to tell: Universities aren’t preparing students for the real world. If only academia would catch up with industry needs, our talent problems would disappear.

This story is seductive because it requires nothing from us. It’s someone else’s problem to solve.

But we’ve been looking at employability completely backwards. We thought employability was something that should arrive at our company gates, fully formed. A box to tick at hiring: “employable” or “not employable.”

The truth? Employability isn’t at the gate; it’s inside the building.

Walk through any company struggling with performance, efficiency, or growth. Trace the problem to its root. You’ll find employability gaps everywhere:

• That project delay? The team lead never learned how to break down complex tasks for juniors.
• Those quality issues? No one taught the operators how to connect their work to customer outcomes.
• That high turnover? Employees can’t see a path to grow because there’s no system for building capabilities.
• Those missed deadlines? The company never installed reliability as a systematic habit.

Every major performance issue, when you dig deep enough, has an employability component. Not because we hired wrong, but because we never completed the manufacturing process.

Most of us became valuable through a messy, unplanned apprenticeship. We learned from that one patient mentor. From production crashing at 3 AM. From clients yelling about deadlines. We had luck. We naturally absorbed knowledge and skills just by being around and experiencing things.. We were thrown into difficult situations that tested us and helped us learn quickly.

And now we demand that universities deliver what we ourselves can’t systematically produce.

The Smoking Gun: A Simple Formula

Let’s get mathematical about this mythology. True employability requires four elements:

Employability = Foundations × Authentic Practice × Learning Agility × Reliability

Universities can deliver Foundations: theories, concepts, problem-solving frameworks. Valuable, but incomplete.

But look at the other three factors:

• Authentic Practice: Working on real problems with real constraints and real consequences
• Learning Agility: Adapting quickly based on immediate feedback from actual work
• Reliability: Showing up, meeting deadlines, maintaining standards under pressure

These aren’t classroom subjects. They’re workplace realities. They can only be fully developed where the work actually happens.

Which means three-quarters of the employability equation is controlled by companies, not schools.

We’ve been blaming universities for not delivering something that, by definition, they cannot fully deliver.

The Global Cost of Our Delusion

This isn’t just some random ideas; it really matters and is based on real facts. Our wrong question is breaking entire economies:

The AI Acceleration Paradox

Companies are laying off thousands of experienced workers because “AI makes them redundant” while simultaneously claiming they can’t find people with the right skills.

Example: A major consulting firm recently laid off 3,000 employees, citing AI efficiency. Six months later, they’re desperately hiring “AI-augmented consultants” at premium salaries. The cruel irony? Those 3,000 employees had decades of client knowledge, industry expertise, and relationship capital. They just needed a few weeks of training on AI tools. Instead of investing in a simple reskilling program, the company threw away institutional knowledge that will take years to rebuild. The real problem wasn’t that the employees became obsolete—it’s that the company never had a system for evolving skills alongside technology.

The Experience Trap

Entry-level jobs requiring three years’ experience. Internships demanding prior internship experience. We’ve created a system where you need experience to get experience.

Example: A renewable energy company in Cape Town posts an “entry-level” solar technician role requiring two years of installation experience. Meanwhile, eager electrical engineering graduates can’t get their foot in the door. The company spends six months searching, eventually poaching someone from a competitor at 40% above budget. What they really needed was an eight-week structured apprenticeship to turn those graduates into productive technicians. But without that system, they’re stuck in an endless loop of searching for unicorns that don’t exist.

The Poaching Wars

Companies spend fortunes stealing talent from competitors instead of building it. Then they complain when their own trained people get poached.

Example: In Kigali’s growing tech scene, companies routinely offer 50-80% salary increases to poach developers. One startup founder told me: “We spent $120,000 last year on recruitment fees and signing bonuses, just to maintain our team size. Every time we train someone, they’re gone within six months.” Meanwhile, Rwanda’s universities graduate hundreds of IT students annually, and Carnegie Mellon Africa is right there in Kigali. But none of these companies have a structured program to turn graduates into production-ready developers. They’re fighting over a tiny pool of experienced developers instead of building the abundant junior talent around them.

The Scale Ceiling

Small companies stay small not because they lack customers or capital, but because they can’t systematically turn potential into performance.

Example: A Belgian electricity and security company in Antwerp had contracts lined up for three major industrial sites that would double their revenue. But they couldn’t deliver because they needed 15 experienced technicians who could handle both electrical installations and security systems integration. The market offered only two options: senior technicians at €75,000+ who were already comfortable elsewhere, or fresh graduates from technical schools who’d never touched a real security panel. No middle ground. They tried hiring juniors but had no system to train them—one mistake on a client’s security system nearly cost them their biggest existing contract. Three years later, they’re still the same size, watching Dutch and German competitors who figured out how to build talent systematically capture those expansion opportunities they had to decline.

The Question That Changes Everything

What if we stopped asking: “Why aren’t universities producing work-ready graduates?”

What if we started asking: “Why aren’t companies producing employable contributors; on purpose?”

This isn’t about letting universities off the hook. It’s about recognizing where employability actually gets completed: in the workplace, through systems we’ve never bothered to build.

The most successful companies in history didn’t wait for perfect talent to show up. Toyota created the Toyota Production System and turned farmers into the world’s most efficient automotive workforce. Google doesn’t hire only experienced engineers; they have a systematic way to turn smart people into Googlers.

They manufacture employability. On purpose. With systems.

The Ubuntu Truth Nobody Wants to Hear

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. The moment you accept that companies complete employability, a predictable fear emerges: “If I invest in making my employees more employable, my competitors will just poach them with higher salaries.”

But this fear itself reveals the problem. It comes from thinking “I am despite you;” seeing other companies as threats to defend against, talent as property to hoard, knowledge as advantage to protect.

This is the opposite of Ubuntu: “I am because we are.”

The companies terrified of poaching are trapped in scarcity thinking. They see employability as a zero-sum game: if my competitor grows stronger, I grow weaker. If my employee becomes more valuable, I’m at risk. If I share knowledge, I lose advantage.

But Ubuntu reveals a different truth: My company is strong because our ecosystem is strong. I am successful because we are successful.

When you truly grasp this, the fear of poaching dissolves. Here’s why:

You are because your industry is. If your sector is known for developing talent, it attracts the ambitious globally. If your ecosystem is weak, you’re fighting over scraps. Would you rather own 100% of a shrinking talent pool or 10% of an exploding one?

Your reputation is because their growth is. When people know your company builds careers, even if some leave, the ambitious line up at your door. When you’re known as a dead-end, even huge salaries won’t attract the best.

Your innovation is because circulation is. When talent flows between companies, carrying knowledge and raising standards, everyone’s game improves. Silicon Valley didn’t dominate by preventing movement; it exploded because of it.

The Ubuntu approach isn’t naive altruism. It’s understanding that in interconnected systems, isolation is death. When you shift from “How do I keep them?” to “How do we all grow?”—something profound happens:

• You stop seeing competitor training programs as threats and start seeing them as expanding your future talent pool
• You stop hoarding knowledge and start building industry standards that lift everyone
• You stop fearing employee growth and start celebrating it as ecosystem success

The practical Ubuntu application: Don’t work in isolation. A siloed approach to employability doesn’t work. Engage your competitors. Build industry-wide apprenticeship standards together. Share training resources. Create common competency frameworks. Yes, people will move between companies; but they’ll move within a rising ecosystem, not a stagnant swamp.

A company thinking “I am despite you” will always fear poaching. A company thinking “I am because we are” makes poaching irrelevant.

This isn’t just philosophy; it’s the only strategy that works in interconnected markets. The choice isn’t whether to embrace Ubuntu thinking. It’s whether to embrace it now while you can shape it, or later when you’re forced to.

The Clock Is Ticking

With AI reshaping work monthly, not yearly, the old model is already dead. We just haven’t admitted it yet.

Companies firing hundreds of employees because they “can’t afford to reskill them” are really saying: “We never learned how to make people employable, and now it’s too late.”

But it’s not too late. Not if we start asking the right question.

Not if we stop waiting for universities to solve a problem that was never fully theirs to solve.

Not if we accept that the skills gap isn’t out there; it’s in our processes, our systems, our assumptions.

What Comes Next

The solution isn’t complex. It doesn’t require million-dollar learning management systems or corporate universities.

It requires seeing employability as a product we manufacture, not a resource we mine.

It requires systems that turn potential into performance; predictably, measurably, repeatedly.

It requires courage to stop blaming and start building.

I’ve developed a systematic approach to manufacturing employability; one that any company can implement with existing resources. I’m now seeking forward-thinking firms in tech, renewable energy, and industrial services who are ready to pilot this approach and prove that the employability crisis is actually an employability opportunity.

If you’re tired of fighting for scarce talent and ready to start building it systematically, let’s talk. The future belongs to companies that can turn potential into performance on purpose.