Lagos State Employment Trust Fund (LSETF) has stepped up efforts to bridge the gap between employability training and actual job placement as more than 300 young Lagosians were brought together with prospective employers at a recruitment fair organised through its partnership with King’s Trust International (KTI).

The initiative, which forms part of the LSETF-KTI Employability Support Project, is designed to equip young people with practical skills needed to navigate the labour market while creating direct pathways to employment.

Speaking at the Get Hired Recruitment Fair and Graduation event in Lagos, the Executive Secretary of LSETF, Feyisayo Alayande, represented by the Director, Programmes and Coordination, Oyindamola Egbeyemi, said the initiative reflected the agency’s broader strategy of tackling unemployment by expanding young people’s access to opportunities.

Alayande said the programme demonstrated that the major barrier facing many young Lagosians was often not a lack of talent or ambition but limited access to training, networks and employers.

She said: “That is what access does. It removes the distance between ambition and achievement. It turns preparation into confidence, confidence into performance, and performance into real economic participation.”

She said that LSETF had, over the past decade, created more than 320,000 direct and indirect jobs across Lagos State, saved 173,000 jobs, disbursed over N15 billion through more than 20,000 loans to micro, small and medium enterprises, supported more than 82,000 small businesses with capacity building and trained over 30,000 young people.

She added that the agency had also supported more than 1,200 technology startups and developed 3,300 talents through its Lagos Innovates initiative.

According to her, the Get Hired programme is intended to close the gap between training and labour-market participation by giving beneficiaries direct access to employers.

The LSETF executive secretary urged employers at the fair to look beyond immediate vacancies and consider the participants as part of the emerging talent pool capable of contributing to business growth and the wider Lagos economy.

She also called on the beneficiaries to approach the recruitment exercise with confidence and demonstrate the skills acquired during the programme.

The LSETF Employability Project Officer, Ajibola Babalola, said the focus was no longer only on training young people but ensuring that they could translate the skills acquired into employment opportunities.

Babalola said the project, which targets 3,000 young people in Lagos between 2024 and 2027, had already empowered more than 800 beneficiaries in its first cycle, while the second cycle is targeting more than 1,000 young people.

She explained that the programme had two major interventions — Get Into, which focuses on vocational and technical skills, and Get Hired, which equips participants with soft skills and other competencies required to secure and retain employment.

According to her, the latest Get Hired cohort had onboarded more than 300 young people who underwent a four-week blended training programme combining online learning with intensive physical sessions.

“Today is the job fair, the climax of the programme, where our trained young people meet with employers with vacancies,” she said.

She added that participants had been trained in Curriculum Vitae (CV) writing, interview preparation, self-presentation and other employability skills, with one-on-one sessions also provided to help them improve their chances of securing jobs.

Babalola said LSETF was optimistic that the recruitment fair would result in meaningful employment placements, stressing that employers had been matched with participants according to their skills and sectors.