“Your career is a business”: Inside the Delta State Innovation Hub’s Tech Talks

The Delta State Innovation Hub, managed by Schoolville under the leadership of CEO Charles Omordia, held the ninth edition of its monthly Tech Talks on the last Friday of the month at its Asaba facility.

Established in July 2016, the hub is one of the oldest of its kind in Nigeria and has weathered a temporary shutdown, yet it remains an active stop on Delta State’s tech calendar.

About 100 people attended this edition, including 12 newly inducted fellows of the Nigeria Jubilee Fellows Programme, industry leaders, about five students each from Government Model Secondary School and Redeemer’s International School, both located near the hub, and students aged 11 to 16 from the hub’s various departments.

The session opened with a question-and-answer segment on whether artificial intelligence could replace teachers. The main event was a presentation by Otuto James Anene, an automation engineer and CEO and co-founder of Cloud Tech Tribe, titled “Your Career Is a Business.”

Job, career, business

Anene began by distinguishing between three terms people often use interchangeably. A job, he said, is any task or role taken to earn a wage, often temporary and disconnected from long-term goals. Approach any work with a short-term mindset and get paid for it, and that is a job.

A career, by contrast, is a long-term journey of creating value through skills, knowledge, and experience, built across a series of jobs, projects, and continuous learning. “You do not get a career, you build one,” he said. “Likewise, you do not build a job, you get one.”

A business is an entity that creates, delivers, and receives value in return, essentially solving problems and getting rewarded for it. A restaurant solves hunger. A boutique solves a clothing need. A transport company solves the problem of movement. These, he said, are the clearest examples of what a business actually does.

Read also: Inside Asaba computer village: A bustling gadgets hub 

Why a career behaves like a business

The core of Anene’s argument rested on the idea that, in business, the company is the asset; in a career, you are the asset. Just as a growing company increases in value over time, a career depends entirely on the individual taking responsibility for growing their own worth.

He invoked the line popularly attributed to Warren Buffett, “the best investment you can make is in yourself,” and pressed the point further. “If you refuse to spend time to improve your career, do not expect the market to value you,” he told the audience.

For Anene, it comes down to mindset. “The moment you see your career as a business, your mindset changes from how can I get the job, to what can I create that people are willing to pay for?”

Six parallels between a career and a business

Anene outlined six areas where careers and businesses operate by the same rules.

Branding comes first. He argued that everyone is born a brand, with a unique name and identity, and pointed to Apple, Coca-Cola, and Indomie as examples of brands that stand out from the crowd.

Product follows branding. A business without a product is like a large shop left empty. In a career, the product is a skill, one that needs to be sharpened and made visible.

Marketing is the third parallel. The best product does not always win; the most visible one does. No matter how much is invested in a business, if it is not marketed, nobody will know it exists. The same applies to professionals: many remain relatively unknown not because their skills lack value, but because they lack visibility. Anene pointed to LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok as platforms professionals can use to build that visibility, summing it up with the line: “Average work in public is far better than excellent work in private.”

Leads come next. Interests are leads, and potential customers come from anyone a person interacts with, including social media followers.

Sales is the fifth parallel. Seeing a career as a business means approaching interviews not as a test to pass but as a sales presentation, an opportunity to sell one’s own brand.

Customers complete the list. A business exists because customers exist, and in a career, the boss occupies that role. The customer, Anene stressed, remains the most important person in any transaction.

The Tech Talks closed with a pitch from Efemena for Kobomine, a savings platform startup, and a product showcase by the hub‘s engineering department, which presented a solar power bank described as built from scratch.

Last updated: July 1, 2026