A few years ago, I was applying for a visa to Canada. Whilst searching for the information online, I came across an agency that proposes its services, for a fee, to fill your application form and take care of the entire process. They used some ambiguous language that made it seem like you had a higher chance of getting a visa if you let them handle your application.
At the Canadian Immigration center in Yaounde, I was also propositioned to have my application filled by them, also for a fee. After 20 years on sitting on school benches, it would have been an aberration for me to accept. I can read and write and certainly can understand instructions on a form. I also know that them filling my application would have had no bearing whatsoever on the outcome of my application process.
So I turned down the offer and did everything myself.
The agency mentioned in the first paragraph is still in business. Dozens of Cameroonians line up there each, many of them graduates of our illustrious universities, paying a fee for someone to fill something as basic as a form, for them.
When I shared the screenshot of a tweet we made from our Twitter account, about a generation of Cameroonian not being able to fill online forms but making great TikTok videos, I was talking about the larger picture of how literacy rate is and writing skills are falling.
But many of you chose to fixate on the CVs and TikTok as the main issue. No problem. Let me indulge you guys on that before I go for the kill.
1) On CVs: Many of you mentioned how CVs are obsolete and how they are not needed in the digital world. First of all many of you tend to overestimate the reach of digital in Cameroon. Internet penetration isn't even yet at 50% and many young people in Cameroon do not have digital literacy skills. MOMO Bertrand I am sure you wont argue with that.
One of our Twitter followers told us that someone wrote the entirety of his email in the subject line. And we are in 2021!
We are very much not as much in the digital world as many of you think and you still need to know how to use the "obsolete" methods.
Unless you are in the creative arts where someone can go to your instagram account and see your work, you need to be able to write a CV or a personal statement. As a creative photographer you even have to be able to properly write captions under your photos to extend the element of storytelling and bring viewers into your frame of mind.
. WAZIH mentioned the existence of artificial intelligence that can write CVs and personal statements for you. I'm sorry but there is never going to be a robot that can feel and express the vast spectrum of human emotion and be able to write a personal statement based on that, that will get you into an Ivy league school. So you are better off learning writing and improving on your reading and comprehension skills.
Even if you are going to be hired for work just off your digital footprint, recruiters are going going to be looking at 3 things in particular. Facebook posts, linked posts and articles, and Twitter threads.
All of these require good writing and communication skills. I've often said one of the things that hold back many people is inability for them to clearly articulate their ideas. A huge part of knowing how to articulately express yourself in writing is by writing often and reading often.
There are born writers and there are writers who learn it as a skill. But even the writer who acquired it as a skill will write better than the born writer if the born writer does not practice.
If a kid spends a lot of time jumping from one viral internet challenge to the next and not investing it in learning how to communicate better, they are setting themselves up for failure. I'm sorry.
2) On TikTok: Some of the comments on that screenshot we posted here basically snickered at us for what we said about TikTok and made mention of how people are earning a living off TikTok.
First of all, you cannot use the American Tiktok ecosystem as a yardstick. We are in Cameroon. Our digital and socio economic system is radically different from that of the west. I work in that ecosystem and I have seen first hand what your "influencers" make from some of their brand representation contracts. I'll spare you the shock value. But it would seem many of you are taken away by the bling.
People like Addison Rae and Khaby Lame pictured above are outliers. They are few of the rare successes solely on that platform. (A lot of content creators migrated from instagram). The people who would use them as an argument are the same people that will tell you not to go to university because Bill Gates dropped out and became a billionaire. They forget that for every 1 super succesful dropout, there 100,000 failed dropouts.
There are thousands of Cameroonians on TikTok. Out of that number, only about a handful have been able to make themselves known. Outside of Diana Bouli, Tik Dengue, Hortarien, Dylan Comedie and a few others everyone else is just marking time and will continue to do so for a long time - for those who want to make money out of it, anyway.
For every 1 successful case, we don't know one thousand others. Many of them are un universities. What happens to them when time catches and there is no breakthrough in sight? And the figures will grow automatically for one, and exponentially for the other.
Even with content creation on TikTok, there is a certain understanding of the digital ecosystem that you need to hone yourself with. You will need to read case studies and a lot resources online. You will also need to learn to manage your own PR and I cannot stress how much knowing how to write a PR statement is very important.
Even extending your brand outside of TikTok with things such as downloadable ebooks and whatnot requires you to be able to have a certain level of critical thinking and if we tell kids today not to worry about learning how to write personal statements but focus on TikTok , we are sending them into a river with a ball and chain around their foot.
And to conclude with the kill, reading, writing and reading comprehension skills are things which will never go obsolete in society. Never! You will always need it at some point. Every time on Facebook I see people advertising goods and they include all the product features and the prices; and then you have someone... that one person who will come and ask "how much?"
I have seen jobs being announced here on this app, with all instructions clearly written, and people have come and in the comment sections, dropped their phone numbers and asked to be called for an interview.
It sounds innocuous and laughable but these are the same people who you will hire in your offices and they will make you lose millions because they did not read the fine print on a contract because it is "too long."
In the wider world that is social media and its many distractions and the internet and its many resources, you are always going to need to have reading and writing and reading comprehension skills.
It is even becoming a rare commodity now and those who have it and can use it well in their different jobs are going to be a race set apart.
Don't play yourselves
W.W