Scholarship / [Chevening Essay] Leadership and Influence [5]

Leadership and Influence essay

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Chevening is looking for individuals who will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examples of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.(minimum word count: 100 words, maximum word count: 500 words)

As a strong believer in the ripple effect impacting and sharing knowledge has in developing the world around me, I have taken advantage of opportunities to do so when they present themselves. While I was a serving corps member in the National Youth Service Corps, I had the opportunity to be the director for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at my Community Development Service (CDS) group. During my tenure, I created training tracks where fellow corps members learnt basic computer proficiency skills and programming. I was able to identify resourceful hands that worked as facilitators in the training program. As part of the CDS activities, I visited Agodi prisons to carry out a train-the-trainer exercise where a group of inmates, who would later train others, were taught desktop publishing skills.

In 2015, Cotta&Cush Limited had just started operations in Lagos, Nigeria and needed to setup an engineering office. Among other considerations was the idea of opening an engineering office in Ibadan (about 82 miles out of Lagos) with the hope of keeping engineers out of the hustle and bustle of Lagos and reduce operational costs. Authorized by the management, I moved to Ibadan to setup the newly acquired office space and execute essential tasks including refurbishing the facility and purchasing equipments ensuring we had a fully functional office space in a space of three days. The initiative I took has continuously saved the company about 60% in operational costs.

The success of that project encouraged me to even contribute more. Cotta&Cush Limited is a company with keen interests in research and development. However, the day-to-day operations of the company make this interest somewhat neglected over the years. Identifying this as a problem, I moved to create a process that allows engineers in the company to take a vacation-like time off their routine work to do some research and development. I was able to pitch the idea to management and get a budget of $200 assigned to each R&D project. I was excited to see my dream for ensuring that creativity thrives and that people in my team do what they like doing best gain ground.

Having worked in the Nigeria tech space for over 2 years now, I have realised that there is a constant need to grow the talent pool to grow the industry and ultimately improve Nigeria's economy. To tackle this problem I have functioned in different capacities - as a facilitator, co-organizer, volunteer and speaker at different programmes including SWE Skills, Google Developer Group (GDG) Ibadan and Forloop Ibadan respectively. Functioning in those capacities has helped me to meet and point younger people especially students interested in starting a career in software engineering or information technology as a whole in the right direction. SWE Skills as a program has produced about 4 software engineers in the last 1 year. Mobile Sites Certification Study Jams, a program I organized and hosted at GDG Ibadan helped about 3 people become Google certified mobile sites developers.

I believe that joining the chevening program is a step in the right direction and will expose me to bigger platforms where my abilities as a leader will be put into doing more for my country and the world at large.