For many Nigerian graduates, getting a first job comes with a frustrating contradiction: employers want experience, but fresh graduates need someone to give them the opportunity to acquire it.
Current recruitment listings, however, show that graduates are still finding entry points through trainee programmes, internships, NYSC placements and skills-based opportunities. These formal graduate trainee openings are fiercely competitive, often attracting tens of thousands of applicants for fewer than twenty slots, making alternative entry points and demonstrable competence essential.
MyJobMag’s graduate trainee listings as of today included openings at Tincan Island Container Terminal, Diya, Fatimilehin & Co., Agary Pharmaceutical Limited and Sixthlab Medical Nigeria Limited, among others. The roles covered engineering, finance, sales and other areas and were targeted at recent graduates or early-career applicants.
The Tincan Island Container Terminal programme, listed by MyJobMag on September 28, 2026, was seeking young graduates in electrical or mechanical engineering for a management trainee programme.
Diya, Fatimilehin & Co.’s programme, listed on September 24, 2026, required a minimum of a Second-Class degree, completion of NYSC and no more than two years’ experience. Sixthlab Medical’s sales graduate trainee position, listed on September 23, offered practical training in medical diagnostics and related sales.
Other opportunities are available to graduates still serving under NYSC. MyJobMag’s NYSC listings on September 29 included an NYSC internship at Trinity Financial Services for accounting, banking and finance graduates, as well as an NYSC opportunity for a fresh computer science graduate at Arit of Africa Limited.
The listings also included NYSC roles in areas such as UI/UX, media production, product management, graphics design, marketing and project management.
For job seekers, the experience gained during NYSC can also be presented more meaningfully on a CV than simply listing the service year. According to the NYSC’s official service-year overview, the programme consists of orientation, primary assignment, Community Development Service (CDS) and the winding-up process.
During primary assignment, corps members are posted to organisations with consideration given to their areas of specialisation, while the CDS component is designed to harness their skills and creativity to address needs in their host communities.
That means a graduate who handled administrative work, taught students, supported customers, worked with data or participated in a community project can describe those responsibilities as part of their experience, provided the claims are accurate.
The NYSC also maintains records of corps members’ primary assignments and assessments. Its bye-laws provide for quarterly records of primary-assignment performance, giving corps members a formal record of their work and capabilities during service.
For graduates without conventional employment history, internships, industrial training, volunteering and personal projects can serve a similar purpose. The important distinction is between simply collecting certificates and demonstrating what was actually done.
Jobberman has advised entry-level applicants to be honest about their experience, acquire relevant skills, target realistic roles and avoid being intimidated by job descriptions that ask for experience. The recruitment platform has also advised candidates without experience to consider volunteering and internships as ways of building experience.
Skills training is another route. The Federal Government’s 3 Million Technical Talent (3MTT) programme, a flagship initiative designed to empower three million technical professionals as part of a broader mandate to create over two million digital jobs, currently focuses on 12 technical areas. These include artificial intelligence and machine learning, data analysis and visualisation, data science, cloud computing, UI/UX design, software development, cybersecurity and product management.
The programme says its training is intended to help participants become competitive in both local and global technical talent markets.
But a certificate alone may not demonstrate what a candidate can do.
A graduate trained in data analysis can build an interactive dashboard from public data. Someone interested in digital marketing can create a sample campaign. A designer can build and curate a visual portfolio on platforms like Behance or Dribbble, while developers can showcase working code through GitHub repositories.
An aspiring administrative worker can demonstrate skills in spreadsheets, documentation and scheduling.
The recruitment market also shows that some employers are deliberately using trainee programmes to bring inexperienced workers into their organisations, and crucially, this extends to Higher National Diploma (HND) graduates, who have historically faced strict barriers compared to their university counterparts. While many corporate graduate schemes strictly require a B.Sc. with a minimum of Second-Class Upper, targeted technical schemes are helping bridge this educational divide.
A September 16, 2026 listing from Greenpeg Nigeria, for example, advertised a technical trainee programme specifically targeting HND graduates with between zero and two years of experience, describing the programme as a route to technical learning and industry exposure.
Current listings also extend beyond Lagos. Indeed’s Nigeria graduate-trainee listings on September 28 included the 2026 Julius Berger Nigeria Graduate Trainee Programme in Abuja and Reckitt Nigeria’s Management Trainee Programme in Lagos, while MyJobMag’s September listings included Dover Engineering’s graduate trainee programme in Rivers State.
The first job, therefore, does not always have to follow the traditional route of university degree followed by several years of employment. For some graduates, the bridge can be NYSC, an internship, a trainee programme, a practical project or a demonstrable technical skill.
The experience requirement remains a barrier for many applicants, but graduates can make themselves more competitive by showing evidence of what they have actually done rather than presenting themselves simply as people looking for their first opportunity.
For employers, that evidence provides a basis for judging what a candidate can contribute. For graduates, it turns an otherwise empty “experience” section into a record of real work, training and responsibility.
