By Morakinyo (Akin) Isaac-Olaniyi
There is a stage in a management trainee’s life that gets almost no attention in Nigerian companies. It is not the day she joins, because we handle that stage well: the campaign runs, thousands of applications get filtered, and a rotation schedule sits ready before she arrives. It is not the first posting either, because most schemes know where a graduate will land at the start. The stage that matters comes three or four years later, once she has delivered results and stopped being the graduate everyone remembers from induction day. At that point she asks a question few schemes have an answer to: what happens to me next? The answer to that question, not the induction, decides whether a scheme built a pipeline or simply ran a recruitment drive.
LinkedIn studied tens of millions of career histories and found that three years after an internal promotion, seventy per cent of employees stayed with their employer. Among staff who moved sideways into a different role, sixty-two per cent stayed. Staff who remained in the same role for three years stayed at a rate of forty-five per cent. A move that added no title and no salary still lifted retention by seventeen percentage points.
We plan the scheme, not the career
Graduate recruitment gets a budget, a deadline and a launch that leaders attend. After that, the graduate is usually folded into whatever process applies to everybody else, and much of the attention created by the scheme fades once the trainee takes a permanent role. Nothing about the reason for hiring her has changed, yet the organisation stops treating her as an investment and starts treating her as headcount. A pipeline needs flow, not just an entrance, and flow requires someone to keep asking where a person goes next.
The one who leaves is the one we made valuable
A graduate at twenty-two may have few options outside the company. A staff member three or four years in has something worth more: a record of delivery, a name on her CV that recruiters recognise, and judgement built on real projects. She now qualifies for study abroad and for employers who pay in currencies that outperform the naira. The company’s investment starts paying off at the exact point the market begins to bid for her.
This is where “japa” enters every conversation about retention, and where Nigerian employers reach for the word too quickly. Exchange rates and visa policy sit outside any single company’s control, and some people will leave regardless of what a scheme does. But blaming japa also lets a company avoid asking what happened in the eighteen months before the resignation letter. Could she name two moves available to her inside the business? Did anyone tell her what experience she needed for either move? Or had her career turned into a cycle of appraisals with no destination attached?
Succession planning starts too late
Ask a Nigerian company for a succession plan, and the conversation begins near the top, with names for director and executive roles. By the time a name reaches that list, years of decisions have already shaped whether the person was even available to be considered. The next director is, right now, a twenty-seven-year-old analyst deciding whether to stay another year in the same role.
Managers hold on to their best people
Nobody names the incentive problem sitting under all of this. A manager who releases a top performer into another function has to backfill that role in a market where talent takes months to find. Keeping a person where they sit protects a manager’s quarter. Releasing them protects the organisation’s next five years. Until a scorecard rewards managers for developing and releasing staff, every mobility policy a company writes stays advisory, something to point to rather than something people follow.
None of this argues against management trainee schemes. It argues against stopping the thinking at the first placement. If, four years in, a company can point to what a graduate needs next and offer a route toward it, a pipeline exists. If nobody has thought past her first promotion, the company has run a recruitment campaign and given it the name talent management.
Morakinyo (Akin) Isaac-Olaniyi is a senior HR and talent leader with close to two decades of experience developing people and organisational capability across multinational businesses. He currently serves as Associate Director, Talent Development at IHS Towers. His work has covered graduate development, succession planning, high-potential talent, performance management, leadership development and career mobility, including the design and implementation of programmes intended to build sustainable internal talent pipelines. He also brings experience in HR transformation and technology, with a growing focus on applying Product thinking to workplace challenges.
