Company Offers Hope to Jobless, Under-employed

Aug. 11, 2011 - PRLog -- Today unemployment stands at over 10% in many states and with less than 500,000 jobs available for the millions still without employment, job searchers are having a harder time setting themselves apart at job interviews.
To add onto their woes, there are millions of under employed people. It is not uncommon today to hear tales of college graduates working in fast food eateries or masters’ graduates working in entry level jobs. The massive underemployment adds to the number of people looking for better opportunities.
Recruiters are also having a tougher time today than in 2006/7 when selecting individuals for the few available places. Many times they will find multiple qualified candidates with similar papers even though the job may require lower qualifications. The question they routinely ask is why hire one candidate over another similarly qualified one? What makes them stand out?
To help them out of this dilemma Crane Consulting House has come up with The AfriGuide. The AfriGuide is an e-guide aimed at educating individuals in west countries about Africa.  
With 54 growing countries, many of which are growing at over 7% per annum, Africa is becoming an attractive investment opportunity for many of the large companies that are hiring. And in order to take advantage of this opportunity, employers would be looking for individuals who have acquired additional knowledgeable of the continent, beyond the usual stereotypes of disease, war and famine.
Explaining the rationale of The AfriGuide company spokesman David Karanja says “Africa is growing rapidly. There are opportunities that companies in the US, UK and Europe are looking into and quite frankly after the Great Recession employees who are not knowledgeable about the new markets in Africa, can easily find themselves redundant.”  
He continues to add “Employees or potential employees must learn something extra, and knowing more about Africa than anyone in the room is definitely becoming hot and sexy in the workplace; and we think The AfriGuide is actually quite a sexy product. It’s like having an MBA without going to college.”
Indeed companies in the US alone have at least $2 trillion dollars in cash on their balance sheets and are now looking for new investment opportunities. The debt crisis in the US and Europe is not giving a lot of confidence to make new investments there and an increasingly stable Africa would prove to be a juicy opportunity for these companies.
It is worthy to note that over 40 African countries have had peaceful handovers of power in recent years and many of them are having the most peaceful period of stability since their independence in the 1950/60s.
However many challenges abound in the continent with lack of power, good infrastructure, food security in some countries, but countries like Kenya which has over 7000MW in geothermal potential are making strides in the direction of solving their problems. The country recently invited international bids worth $3.2 Billion for companies to build 8 geothermal power plants to generate an additional 800MW of power to supply the country’s grid.
With similar initiatives by countries across Africa, knowing the most about Africa is becoming important and a product such as The AfriGuide which is available on www.craneconsultinghouse.com, may actually help those searching for jobs show the knowledge value they bring to an organization hence standing out in interviews; this definitely is a win-win situation for both employer and employee.
It has been said, ‘extraordinary challenges require extraordinary solutions.’ Being jobless for weeks on end is definitely an extraordinary challenge that needs out of the box solutions.

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Crane Consulting House is a company based in Kenya whose aim is to provide quality information to investors into Kenya and Africa, as well as donors and students in International or African Affairs