Things You Can Engage In During Your Service Year – MUST READ

Things You Can Engage In During Your Service Year is a must read and must share article. The compulsory NYSC service year is a time most new graduates get to experience a glimpse of the real world, while the Nigerian government pays them about 33k monthly allowance.

Many of them take the period to acquire new skills, others focus strictly on the jobs they’ve been assigned to carry out by the government. Some go the extra mile to record achievements in their serving communities, which make them stand out from other youth corps members at the end of the NYSC service year, while a few others go on to build remarkable businesses that will eventually employ many of the other NYSC youth corps members.

With thousands graduating from the universities yearly to add to the pile of unemployed graduates in the country, how can you make the most of the compulsory single-service year? What should you pay attention to? And ultimately, how can you make money during your NYSC service year?

Either you are searching for how to save money during NYSC, how to make money during NYSC, what to do during NYSC and skills to learn during NYSC. You should keep reading this article because you will discover how to make out the best life during NYSC.

Below are lucrative tips to convert your NYSC service year into one of the best years and take full advantage of it. Go through this piece and thank me later!!

15 Things You Can Engage In During Your Service Year

1. Acquire Vocational Skills

The service year is a period where you can be a boss of your own and be self-employed. Gains skills like fashion designing, catering, cosmetology and much more depending on whatever you are interested in. Enroll for Skill Acquisition And Entrepreneurial Development (SAED)  programs.

2. Get Professional Certification

You don’t need to depend on your BSc or HND certificate only. The workplace is changing drastically. “You need to give them what they want before you can get whatever you need”.

Get an affordable and accessible platform to run professional courses so you can be employable at the end of your service year.QUALIFY can give you all it take to get Qualified for any job position you are seeking.

3. Engage In Retail Businesses

During the period when you are serving your fatherland, you can as well serve yourself by engaging yourself in a small business that will at least fetch you income rather than depending on the allowance from the federal government or state. If you know about snacks, you could be making snacks. I have a female corper that used to sell Chin-chin to us during CDS and shes making her money.

4. Get A Place Of Secondary Assignment

Asides from your place of primary assignment (PPA), you can devote yourself to other activities, you can get a place of secondary assignment where you seek a part time job or work during the weekend.

5. Help Students Write Their Research Projects

Most final year university students always have problems writing their research projects. It gets cumbersome for some, especially those who are not entirely academically sound or do not wish to risk failure. To ensure they can get a professional paper written, they tend to outsource them to individuals and businesses who focus on writing research projects.

As a youth corps member, you could market your professional research project writing service to university students and use a large part of your one year to write and deliver a bulk of them.

With final year projects costs going anywhere from 50,000 Naira to 150,000 Naira per project, successfully writing and delivering between 10 to 50 research projects at a price of 50,000 Naira each, during your NYSC year, can enable you to generate anywhere from 500,000 Naira to 2,500,000 Naira in revenues.

If you’re able to build a wide network across universities and get 100s of students to commit their final research project writing to your organization, you could hire several hands and make anywhere from 3,000,000 Naira to over 10,000,000 Naira during your NYSC service year by just writing research projects for final year students.

6. Organize Professional Training

Most students try to acquire professional certifications during their academic years. Organizations also do spend a lot of money training their staffs periodically, to ensure they’re up-to-date with the latest sales strategies, technologies, and industry standards that will help the organization grow.

As a youth corps member, you could find professionals with wide certifications in each field, put together a training brochure, and organize a marketing team that can go out to market your training services to organizations, students, and more.

By marketing the quality of your instructors, their track records, and how their impact could help an organization grow, you could easier land corporate training gigs and split the revenues with the instructors.

An entrepreneur who did this successfully was Jimoh Ibrahim. He organized a lot of training during his NYSC service year and eventually made up to 70 million Naira at the end of the period, while a lot of his colleagues were looking for paying jobs of about 10,000 Naira monthly at the time.

7. Start An Agricultural Business

The Nigerian prospect for entrepreneurs venturing into Agriculture has shown beyond doubt that any entrepreneur who runs and grows a successful farm can generate high revenues from exports and local sales.

Nigeria is a country blessed with rich highly-demanded export valued products like Sesame seeds, Cassava, Snails, Poultry products, Fisheries, and a whole lot more.

By venturing into small scale agriculture, you can learn the rudiments of the business, make mistakes early on, and eventually reap the benefits the industry has to give for agropreneurs who successful grow products that are market ready.

8. Start A Neighbourhood Drycleaning Service

A constant increasingly busy workforce reduces the time people have to focus on doing their laundry, and so, they mostly take them to the neighborhood dry cleaners.

Asides the working population, most people have needs to dry-clean special items like curtains, suits, native attires, and a whole lot more. And because of this, they go on to periodically drop their clothing in the nearest or recommended affordable drycleaner in their neigbourhood.

With the average new local drycleaner charging about 200 Naira for a cloth and washing about 100 hundred clothing a week for a total of about 20,000 Naira, you’re on track to starting and growing a successful neighbourhood laundry service.

You can start by spreading word about your business by distributing flyers, announcing your service at community meetings, and asking your clients to spread word about your business.

9. Start A Home Tutoring Service

With the advent of fast growing tutor platforms like Prepclass and the likes, a graduate can easily register on their platform and get assigned to parents and their children for a home tutoring service. They’re then given a period during the week where they coach the child, and get paid directly by Prepclass.

You could either register on the PrepClass platform to get assigned to coach a child, or you could start a home coaching service, where you could link up other corpers and teachers to various parents for a home tutoring service.

10. Start A Photography Business

The photography business continues to grow every day. It is spread across so many categories that people go on to focus on single niches like lifestyle photography, wedding photography, fashion photography, and a whole lot more.

A lot of people are photo-frenzy now. They always run to a photo studio for birthday photos, wedding photos, and several others. As a youth corps member, you could start out as a lifestyle photographer, promote your craft well on social networks like Instagram, then gradually start covering weddings, personal photography sessions, and a whole lot more.

With the success of major photographers who started their crafts weigh back in the university like BLawz, Obi Somoto, and a whole lot more, the photography business has continued to show immense promise for new and existing entrants.

11. Start A Fashion Design & Tailoring Business

The fashion business is one of the fastest growing industries in Nigeria. So many people are venturing into it because of the extraordinary demand by the market, the increased needs to amend and sew custom-made clothing from scratch, the widespread growth of fashion shows and events, the attractive profit margins generated by some fashion designers, and the prospective long-term growth of the business.

This business is perfect for any prospective small business owner, especially youth corps members. By training in a fashion school for about 3 months and getting a small store with a sewing machine, any youth corper can make the most of their NYSC service year by starting and growing a fashion or tailoring business.

12. Start A Bakery Business

The bakery business is another fast growing business in the country. The increased demand for junk food at schools, markets, neighbourhoods, and several public places continues to grow the prospects the industry has.

A youth corps member could start a small bakery business, package the items in tiny sealed nylons, and distribute to people who market in public places, schools, and a lot more other locations. Some tasty items that can be baked are doughnuts, meat pies, cup cakes, and a whole lot more.

You could also run an on-demand bakery business for people celebrating birthday parties, weddings, and generally occassions and events.

13. Start A Professional Cleaning Service

Organisations and individuals usually require the services of professional cleaners to keep their offices and homes neat. Busy workers pay some cleaners to tidy up their environments on the weekends, while companies usually sign long-term contracts with professional cleaning businesses to keep their surroundings looking neat.

14. Start A Food Supply Business

One business that will never run out of customers is the food supply business. People always need to feed, and as such, they visit canteens, restaurants, and even patronise people who supply home cooked meals to offices and various locations. Do you nee a strategy for this to work, just ask me below.

You can start a food supply business by first trying to poach people you know who work in organisations with the offer of supplying their lunch to them. You could then further market your services to their colleagues, so they can know their lunches can get delivered to them every afternoon.

After using your friends to start, you can visit organisations to promote your service, set up a website to advertise your service, and be very active on social media, where you’d post rich, attractive, and mouth-watery pictures of your meals, alongside amazing picture or video customer testimonials.

15. Sell On Online Marketplaces

Finally, you can buy and sell items on online marketplaces like Jumia, Konga, Payporte, and a whole lot more. By doing this, you don’t get to pay for web hosting, online advertisement, website design, and several other maintenance costs that can eat deep into your business. Instead, you get to focus on buying and reselling the products that people want, at the cost of nothing.

To figure out what products are selling, you can go to Konga and look at the average number of sales an item has. This way, you can have an idea of what people want to buy, and then try to sell those type of items.

If you don’t have money to buy products, you can first confirm what items people buy the most, then take pictures of items owned by a business you can strike a deal with, upload them online, and broker the sales for a commission, pending when you can afford to buy your own products.

You can take advantage of this by setting up a professional cleaning service. Then build a team of marketers who could be co-corpers to visit various organisations with you to market your corporate cleaning service.

In the process of marketing them and distributing your flyers in the organisations, you could also distribute a special flyer that shows a home cleaning package for the workers in the organisations you visit. This way, even if the organisation doesn’t call your business to handle their cleaning service, one of the employees may give you a call concerning taking care of their homes.

I hope you can find this piece helpful, as the saying goes, “ An  Idle Hand is The Devil’s workshop”.

Am wishing you a great service year experience. If you have any question, just ask me below.

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