Ghana’s graduate unemployment and the skill mismatch crisis should not be blamed entirely on what universities teach; this is the view of Marketing Professor and Tech Enthusiast Prof. Kobby Mensah.
The professor is challenging the age-old narrative that the country’s education system is producing graduates with the wrong skills for the labour market. According to Prof. Mensah, who has lived, studied and taught in both England and Ghana, there is no fundamental difference between the course content taught in Ghana and those used in Western educational systems that would justify placing the blame for graduate skills gaps solely on universities.
Speaking during The High Street Journal’s The High Street Talks, Prof. Mensah instead pointed to another part of the equation he believes is often overlooked which is the responsibility of employers.
He maintains that employers have the responsibility to orient, train and gradually integrate young graduates into the workplace. His position marks a significant departure from earlier concerns raised during the discussion that Ghana’s content-heavy education system may be producing graduates who struggle to meet employers’ practical demands.
No Difference Between Content in Ghana and the West
Drawing from nearly 22 years of experience in England, including his studies and professional exposure, Prof. Mensah said he does not see a fundamental difference in course content between Ghanaian and British education.
He argued that educational systems generally rely on established academic texts and principles to develop students’ knowledge and expertise. The real difference, he suggested, may be found less in what students are taught and more in what happens after they are hired.
For instance, an accountant may understand the same accounting principles regardless of whether they studied in Ghana or England. What changes from one employer to another could be the software, internal systems, procedures and work culture.
With this Prof. Kobby Mensah argued, is precisely what employers should be prepared to teach new recruits.
The Workplace Has Its Own Language
The marketing professor and tech enthusiast cited his experience working with telecommunications companies T-Mobile and Vodafone, where he encountered similar industry systems but different organisational cultures and work practices.
He explained that employers in England typically provide new employees with an orientation period, sometimes lasting about three months, to familiarise them with the organisation’s systems, processes and work environment. The purpose is not necessarily to reteach the graduate their profession, but to show them how that particular organisation operates.
An accountant may know accounting but need training on QuickBooks or another system. A graduate may possess the required technical knowledge but still need to understand the company’s reporting structures, internal procedures and performance expectations. He stressed that knowing the job is different from knowing how a particular employer wants the job done.
‘How Do You Expect a Student to Fit In?’
Prof. Mensah believes Ghanaian employers often fail to recognise this distinction. He pointed to examples of young people completing national service and being immediately placed under significant performance pressure without adequate orientation.
In one example, he cited national service personnel in the banking sector being given targets to mobilise huge sums of cedis almost immediately after joining an institution. For Prof. Mensah, such expectations expose an uncomfortable contradiction in the graduate employment debate.
Employers demand job-ready graduates, but may not always provide the environment needed to make them job-ready. He questioned how a young graduate can reasonably be expected to understand an organisation’s systems, culture, processes and targets without first being given the opportunity to learn them.
The Employer Has a Responsibility Too
Prof. Mensah is not absolving graduates of responsibility. Rather, he believes the conversation must properly distinguish between the responsibilities of the university, graduate and employer.
Universities provide foundational knowledge. Graduates must develop competence, adaptability and a willingness to learn. But employers, he argued, must also provide workplace orientation and the organisation-specific training required to translate academic knowledge into productive performance.
The failure to recognise these separate responsibilities, he said, creates an unfair situation where employers can quickly label graduates as lacking the required skills when the real problem may partly be insufficient workplace onboarding and training.
The Bigger Question
Prof. Kobby Mensah believes there should be a shift in the graduate skills-mismatch debate from a simple “universities are producing the wrong graduates” narrative to a more nuanced question of Are employers expecting graduates to arrive fully formed?
The answer, he suggests, should be no. A graduate should not need to know every company’s software, internal procedures, culture or performance system before being hired. Those are partly employer-specific competencies, and employers have a responsibility to teach them.
For Ghana, the solution to the graduate employment challenge may therefore require more than curriculum reform. It may also require companies to rethink how they recruit, onboard, mentor and train young talent.
