Preparing Nigerian Youth for the Future of Work: Rethinking Secondary Education, Digital Skills and Employability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Nigeria must prepare one of the world’s fastest-growing youth populations for a future of work that is uncertain, uneven and contested. This article presents a critical policy analysis of the dominant policy response: incorporating digital skills and AI literacy into secondary schooling as the route to youth employability. Drawing on Nigerian and African scholarship alongside international and institutional evidence, including reports from UNESCO, the ILO, the World Bank and Nigerian government data, it examines three assumptions underlying this agenda: that schools can build digital competencies before students secure foundational literacy and numeracy, that a skills deficit rather than a structural scarcity of decent work is the primary constraint on youth employment, and that policymakers can transplant AI literacy frameworks from the global North into Nigeria without attention to infrastructure, the informal economy or epistemic dependency. The article presents no new empirical findings; it synthesises existing evidence to advance three propositions, one responding to each assumption. It argues that a future-ready secondary education should be anchored in foundational learning, responsive to labour-market demand and grounded in local conditions: consolidating basic learning while introducing digital learning progressively alongside it, teaching AI critically as a civic and productive capability, connecting schools to the informal economy and indigenous apprenticeship traditions, and treating teacher development and implementation capacity, rather than curriculum content alone, as central constraints on reform. For policy and practice, this implies sequencing curriculum reform alongside foundational learning and teacher capacity building, and pairing supply-side education reform with demand-side economic policy.