The useless courses lists measure the wrong thing. What junior employers actually read for, why two graduates of the same department end up in different places, the invisible cost of waiting, and how to tell whether your gap is skill or presentation.
Was My Course a Waste? What Actually Decides Whether a Nigerian Graduate Gets Hired
Almost nobody is rejected for studying the wrong thing. They are rejected because nothing in their application shows they can do a specific job. Employers hiring for junior roles read for evidence of work, not for the name of a degree, which is why graduates of so-called useless courses get hired every week and graduates of respected ones sit at home. The fix is usually one demonstrable skill and an application that proves it, not another four years.
About those "useless courses" lists
Search for useless courses to study in Nigeria and you will find list after list, usually the same handful of departments, usually with no evidence attached. They are written for clicks and they do real damage, because a final year student reads one and concludes the next four decades are already decided.
Here is what those lists are actually measuring, when they are measuring anything: how many graduates of a course walk into a job with that course's name in the title. That is a narrow question. It says a great deal about how many formal jobs exist with a matching label, and almost nothing about whether you personally can be employed.
Two students from the same department, same year, same result, end up in completely different places within eighteen months. The course cannot explain that. Something else does.
What actually decides it
Sit on the other side of the desk for a moment. A junior vacancy attracts a few hundred applications. One person sorts them. They are not comparing degrees, they are looking for a reason to believe a stranger can do a particular job on a particular day.
Three things create that belief, and none of them are your department.
- A named skill, not a field. "I can run a shared inbox and a help desk queue" is a skill. "I studied mass communication" is a field. Only one of them answers the advert.
- Evidence somebody can open. A worked example, a short document, an assessment you completed. Anything that lets them check rather than trust.
- Specifics with numbers in them. How many, how often, what changed. A number makes a claim checkable, and checkable claims survive the sort.
Your degree does one useful thing here: it proves you can be taught something difficult over a long period and finish it. That matters, and it is not nothing. It simply is not sufficient on its own, and it never was, for any course on any list.
The arithmetic nobody does
There is a cost to waiting that does not show up anywhere, because it is invisible and gradual.
A year spent applying with the same unchanged application costs you the year, and it costs you something worse: your CV develops a gap you will be asked about, and your confidence in interviews quietly erodes. The second effect is the one that lasts. People who have been searching for a long time start to apologise for themselves in the first thirty seconds of an interview, and the interviewer hears it.
Compare that with the cost of getting demonstrably good at one specific thing. That takes weeks, not years, and at the end of it your application says something an employer can act on. Whether you do that through a free course, a paid one, a friend who already does the work, or sheer stubbornness with the internet, matters far less than whether it actually happens.
We are not going to put figures on either side of that comparison. Anyone showing you a neat calculation of what you will earn is guessing, and we would rather you did the arithmetic with numbers you gathered yourself from live job adverts than with numbers we made up.
Which skill, then?
The honest answer is: the one there is measurable demand for, that you can stand doing every day, and that you can prove within a few weeks. That usually means the unglamorous end of the list.
- Customer support. The widest door in remote work. Rewards patience and clear writing.
- Assistant work. Inboxes, calendars, research, documents. Rewards organisation.
- Bookkeeping. Rewards people who want things to balance, and it is genuinely scarce.
- First line technical support. Access problems, devices, tickets. No coding involved.
- Appointment setting. Rewards people who are not frightened of a phone.
Notice what is missing. Design, video editing, writing and marketing strategy are the ones people are pushed towards, and they are the hardest places to start, because you compete against portfolios built over years by the entire internet.
Do the free things first
Before anybody pays for anything, there is a stack of work that costs nothing and fixes the most common problem, which is presentation rather than ability.
- Cut your CV to one page and make the top third answer the advert.
- Make your online profile agree with your CV, exactly.
- Produce one piece of proof, however small.
- Rehearse your interview answers out loud and listen back.
- Apply to ten well-matched adverts and record every one.
That is the whole of our free Getting Ready to Be Hired course, open to anyone, no account and nothing to buy. A surprising number of people who assume they need training discover they needed a readable CV and one piece of evidence.
Also worth doing: look up graduate trainee programmes, which are one of the few routes that hire on potential rather than experience. They are competitive and worth the effort of applying properly.
When training is the right answer
After you have done all of that, the gap becomes visible. There are only two honest possibilities.
If employers are replying and then stopping after the interview or the test, the gap is skill, and training is the right answer. If nobody replies at all, the gap is presentation, and no course will fix it, because nobody is getting far enough to see your skills.
That distinction is worth more than any list of courses. It tells you what to spend on, and more often it tells you what not to spend on.
So, was your course a waste?
Almost certainly not. It is doing exactly what it can do, which is less than you were told and more than the lists suggest. The gap between where you are and being employable is usually one nameable skill, one piece of evidence, and an application that reads like it was written for the job in front of it.
If the skill really is the missing piece, that is what the Academy tracks exist for: they teach the work and assess you on it until you can show what you can do. Employment is never guaranteed, by us or by anyone honest.