Everyone knows the importance of a good education. It isn’t just about learning the skills but about gaining the resources to succeed in your career.
Mo Ekujumi recognizes this, and his passion for education and the realization that education is the most important thing anyone has to change their life have always been the motivating factor in most of his endeavors.
Building From The Ground Up
It helped him in building the first accredited online MBA program in Nigeria. Now, that passion is the driving force behind his work at SkillHat, an EdTech platform that provides expert training and career development programs to help young professionals transition into tech and grow in their careers.
After acquiring a degree in Communication, Culture, and Information Technology from the University of Toronto Mississauga, Ekujumi delved head-first into program management, working with and leading teams across fortune 500 companies and several startups, including African unicorn Andela.
The entrepreneurship bug bit him, and he deviated a bit from his Edtech path to co-found Aquanova Global Systems, a water-tech company, with two other co-founders. Aquanova sold a unique product, Aquaalign, which helped improve irrigation systems to increase agricultural yield in crops and livestock in Africa.
However, the product did not find a market fit, and the startup shut down. This did not deter him as he is a strong believer in failing forward. “In business, you will hit rock bottom several times, but you have to get up, learn from those mistakes and try again.”
Learning The Ropes
Mo Ekujumi continued to pursue his passion for education, this time moving from Andela to lead the business development efforts of the EdTech unit of Nigerian tech conglomerate Ventures Garden Group.
At VGG, he led the team that built Nigeria’s first online MBA program in partnership with Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria, enabling over a thousand people remotely access their post-graduate education within the first three months of launch.
In 2017 Ekujumi moved back to Canada after working in Lagos for three years. He realized, however, that he was not as familiar with the country and its work methods as he used to be, and he needed to upgrade his skills to keep up with the latest standards, so he took a Bootcamp course offered by Toprun consulting.
The boot camp improved him, but he also found a few ways to improve the boot camp and offered to develop and teach a curriculum for Product Management and Business Analysis in tech leadership. In the three years he taught the course, he built up some of the basic skills he would need in building SkillHat.
Bootstrapping To Success
While working with Toprun consulting, Ekujimi noticed that many young professionals lacked technical and soft skills, great portfolios, and the network and confidence to succeed.
So he developed SkillHat to solve these problems; helping students gain knowledge and get certified, gain product experience by working on projects and provide access to mentorship sessions with professionals from Stripe, Amazon, and Google to provide guidance as they navigate their career pathways.
It’s been almost two years since Ekujumi started SkillHat; since then, the company has trained over 400 professionals, helping ease their transition into the tech industry, earning a valuation of $1.5 million without any outside funding from VCs or other investors.
The company continues to build with the intention of creating a strong tech community for people of color and other minorities. And Ekujumi is more determined to help more black people get into and thrive in the tech industry.
Everyone knows the importance of a good education. It isn’t just about learning the skills but about gaining the resources to succeed in your career.
Mo Ekujumi recognizes this, and his passion for education and the realization that education is the most important thing anyone has to change their life have always been the motivating factor in most of his endeavors.
