Olumuyiwa Olanrewaju, director, professional services, Watershed Academy in this interview with BusinessDay, explains how a strategic training approach can help address identified skill gap across various sectors. Excerpt:
How would you gauge the performance of Watershed Academy in the past few years?
Watershed Academy is only two years this February and our business activities actually commenced a year ago. I am not surprised at your question because that is the first question most people ask us because they believed our performance has been impressive within the short period of time we entered training and consulting industry.
Our performance is attributable to God, passion for our work, resourcefulness and high thirst for excellence. Within the last one year, we have been able to train professionals in the area of finance, investment and oil and gas. This was possible because we have focus and our focus is capacity development in the area of finance, economics and oil and gas.
Our firm through various training and professional programmes, offers professionals excellent opportunities to acquire required skills that are key to achieving their career development and relevance and to measurable contribution to their institutions goals.
What are the strategies put in place to achieve this objective of capacity development among professionals?
Our vision actually is to become a preferred provider of professional training solutions with relevant contemporary proficiency and techniques required to translate theories into practical skills in the fields of finance, economics and energy in Nigeria.
So, in order to achieve this, we have established strategic partnership with world class institutions in our chosen sectors. This gives us competitive advantage over our peers in delivering good practice and professionalism across the depth and breadth of finance, economics, power and oil & gas sectors.
We also have a pool of competent and experienced professionals with quality exposure in relevant fields as our faculty members. These are people who facilitate our various training programmes.
How bad is the knowledge deficit in the training sectors you specialise in?
Our sector is not doing badly. While there are some who entered the business for pecuniary purpose, we are in the business to add value. Therefore talking about knowledge deficit in the industry is relative. You will be talking about knowledge deficit where people want to be jack of all trades ending up becoming master of none.
So among those categories, there would definitely be knowledge deficit. In order not to find ourselves in the same situation, we have defined our sector of interest as I mentioned earlier and have developed water tight strategies to deliver a bouquet of value added training solutions to our discerning clients.
What are the next major events you have scheduled for this year?
Watershed Academy has a wide range of training programmes to offer both private and public sectors in our chosen fields of interest this year.
Our training schedules for the year are in the following categories: Technical Analysis Courses, Investment Analysis & Risk Management Courses, Banking Analytics & Data Mining, Research & Economic Modelling, Empowerment Courses, Harnessing Accounting Packages Courses and customised Induction programmes.
In addition, Watershed Academy in partnership with Cognitro Analytics, USA, has put together a Predictive Banking Workshop Series. This series of training programme is targeted at addressing some identified skill gap in the banking sector of Nigerian economy.
Why Predictive Analytics for banking at this time?
The new science of Predictive Analytics is helping organisations maximise their valuable data assets and creating a new breed of smart, efficient and Predictive banks. As financial institutions continue to struggle in the aftermath of the recent economic crisis, leading and visionary banks are turning to analytics to minimise exposure risk, maximise customer relation and manage market uncertainties.
To guide their strategy, they must be proactive in harnessing their customer and operational data in order to fast forward into the future and predict financial mishaps before they happen.
Analytics in turn can help banks answer complex questions that have a direct impact on the bottom line, such as which customers are likely to close their accounts? Which are likely to default on loan and credit card payments? or which are likely to engage in fraudulent activities?
The trainings are in four categories namely: Marketing & CRM Analytics, Operation (Fraud & AML) Analytics; Credit & Risk Analytics and Competitive Intelligence & Analytics
