A Nigerian look at how people found work in 1926, 1976 and 2006, what changed, what never did, and what today’s job seekers can learn from each era.

Last updated: 22 October 2026

On 1 June 1926, The Nigerian Daily Times printed its first copy, exactly 100 years before this year’s calendar turned to October. Nobody holding that paper could have imagined a job seeker in Lagos updating a profile on a phone, or an employer finding them without a single application.

Yet the basic problem has not changed. Someone has work to give, someone else needs it, and both sides need a way to trust each other. What has changed is the gatekeeper: a mission school and a European employer in 1926, a university degree and the state in 1976, a newspaper advert and a cyber café in 2006, and a profile and a search algorithm today.

This article walks through each era with a Nigerian focus. A caution first: there is very little Nigerian research on the day-to-day mechanics of job hunting in the past, so where we lack direct evidence we say so and lean on what historians, economists and surveys do tell us. Global data comes mostly from the US and Europe and is a benchmark only.

100 Years Ago: 1926

Jobs were few and tied to the colonial economy. Wage work in Nigeria in the 1920s meant the colonial administration, trading firms, the railway, the mines and the mission schools. A historian’s account of colonial boarding schools says that secondary education was available only to a privileged few, and that missions and the colonial government set up schools to train teachers, commercial clerks and civil servants. In other words, for the few who got a place in school, the school was the first stage of the job search.

The clerk was the model white-collar job. A mid-1930s survey of Nigerian Railway workers described a government railway of about 1,892 miles employing people from many ethnic groups across four departments. It also noted that clerks who completed a year at £78 a year had to pass a written and oral examination on their work. Even then, a job came with formal tests as well as connections.

Mines and the colliery mixed forced and voluntary labour. In a study of the Enugu Government Colliery, which opened in 1915, the author describes a workforce that included forced and voluntary unskilled labourers, prisoners, contract workers and voluntary clerical workers and artisans. Searching for a job was not the same experience for everyone.

Race and status shaped who got hired. A conference paper on the exclusion of educated Africans from colonial service in Lagos between 1890 and 1930 argues that colonial officials, merchants and missionaries increasingly distrusted educated Africans and removed them from clerical and public service posts. Education opened doors, but not equally.

Paper mattered, but it was a testimonial, not a CV. Colonial Office guidance printed in the early twentieth century, as reproduced in this archive page, told candidates for colonial posts to name two referees and submit originals and copies of up to six testimonials. That is a useful picture of the pre-CV era: a job seeker’s evidence was other people’s letters about them.

How did people hear about jobs? Most likely through family, church, school and the workplace itself. The Nigerian Daily Times launched in 1926 and the Lagos Daily News had started a year earlier, so a printed public square was forming. We found no study that measures how many Nigerian jobs were advertised in print in 1926, so we do not claim that newspapers were the main route.

What was happening elsewhere. In the US, researchers who study old newspapers have used Kansas City Star help-wanted ads from 1920 to 1936 to understand how women’s work was advertised. A study of Austrian newspaper job ads from 1870 and 1927 found growing specialisation and formality in employment relationships. And the standalone résumé was not yet normal: one researcher’s review, published on a university-linked anthropology blog, says job applications did not regularly include a separate sheet of education and work history until the late 1930s.

50 Years Ago: 1976

Nigeria was in the middle of the oil boom. Oil replaced cocoa, groundnuts and palm oil as the main foreign-currency earner, and by 1975 the country had become one of the world’s top oil producers, according to this history of Nigeria’s petro-state years. The government created the National Youth Service Corps by decree in 1973 and, according to the US Library of Congress country study, the number of universities rose from five at the start of the civil war to thirteen by 1975.

Graduates were scarce, and public jobs were close to automatic. A NISER policy brief says that until the 1980s the expectation of secure public-sector employment right after graduation prevailed, and that the picture shifted from around 1985 when the government pushed the economy towards the private sector. An academic paper in the Sokoto Educational Review likewise describes graduate unemployment as a non-issue in Nigeria’s early decades because of a shortage of graduates.

The civil service was the prize. The Udoji commission, set up in 1972, led to the 1974 salary and structural review known as the Udoji Award. A Vanguard retrospective says the Udoji era is generally regarded as the golden era of the Nigerian civil service. There was a price: a ThisDay column notes that inflation rose from 5.4 percent in 1973 to 12.67 percent in 1974 and 33.96 percent in 1975, and argues that oil-fuelled expansion of public service jobs was often driven by politics rather than capacity.

How people searched. The Daily Times had grown to a circulation of 275,000 by 1975, according to its Wikipedia entry, and the federal government took a 60 percent stake in it and the New Nigerian that September. Newspapers, the public service and personal introductions were all part of the landscape, but again we found no dataset on how 1970s Nigerian graduates actually found their first jobs. What the evidence supports is the context: a labour market in which scarce degrees opened public-sector doors.

What was happening elsewhere. In 1970, a former pastor named Richard Bolles self-published What Color Is Your Parachute?, which Ten Speed Press began publishing commercially in 1972. His advice, as summarised in his obituary, put little hope in job postings and résumé blasts and pushed personal connections, including the informational interview. The same anthropology-blog review mentioned above found that even until the mid-1980s most job ads did not ask for résumés up front, but gave a number to call or told people to apply in person. A 1976 job search in much of the world meant phone calls, typed letters and walking in.

20 Years Ago: 2006

The newspaper still mattered, but the screen was arriving. NPR described the shift in December 2006, noting that for almost a century a job search usually began with the sound of a newspaper opening, and that classifieds were fragmenting into tens of thousands of websites. Poynter reported on a January 2006 Borrell Associates study that called 2005 a bonanza year for recruitment advertising, with newspapers still seeing double-digit gains in help-wanted ads even as Monster, CareerBuilder and Craigslist grew.

Surveys show a mixed picture. A Conference Board survey of people who searched between January and September 2007, reported by InternetNews, found that 73 percent used the Internet, up from 66 percent in 2005, while newspaper use fell from 75 percent to 65 percent. More than half, 51 percent, also networked through friends and colleagues. In another survey, 31.7 percent of respondents in 2006 said they found their last job through a commercial job board. Referrals did not make the top five that year but reached almost 13 percent by 2015. These are US-centred surveys, so read them as the global direction of travel.

In Nigeria, the internet was only beginning to reach people. World Bank data compiled by Statistics of the World shows that about 5.5 percent of Nigerians used the internet in 2006, against 39.2 percent in 2023. GSM mobile service had launched in 2001, and according to an Intelpoint review subscribers grew from about 20 million in 2005 to over 80 million by 2010. For many people, the first internet connection was a cyber café. Quartz recalled how cyber cafés created businesses and jobs and connected young Nigerians to the world, but also became linked with internet fraud, until cheap mobile internet largely replaced them.

The banks were hiring and firing. The 2004 to 2005 bank consolidation reduced the number of banks from 89 to 25, and Brand Times notes that it triggered widespread job losses, branch closures and outsourcing. Yet a study of banking policy and job security concludes that demand for fresh graduates was high in the post-consolidation period. For a 2006 graduate in Lagos, that meant bank recruitment drives were a major route to a first job, and for experienced bankers, a real fear of redundancy.

Online job boards were not yet a Nigerian habit. Jobberman launched in August 2009, started by three students at Obafemi Awolowo University during a lecturers’ strike. The BBC reported that employers using the site grew from about 40 in 2009 to thousands within five years, and that early on many people did not trust an internet-based business because the internet was so often used for fraud in Nigeria. That distrust is worth remembering: it is the same worry job seekers have about scam adverts today.

Today: 2026

The job search now runs on profiles, alerts and algorithms. NapoleonCat estimates around 14 million LinkedIn users in Nigeria as of mid-2026, though these are advertising-audience estimates rather than a census. Job boards such as MyJobAlly let you build a profile, get alerts and be found by employers through the candidate listing, and tools like MyJobAlly’s Optimize Your CV help you present your experience clearly.

The old trust problem has come back in a new form. On 19 October 2026, Africa Check flagged fake Facebook ads claiming Dangote Group was hiring thousands for a Kenyan refinery, and earlier it documented a fake KPMG graduate trainee advert in Nigeria. Competition has also swelled: a CV-service site, Profolio, estimates that a single graduate trainee opening can draw 5,000 to 15,000 applications, though that is a commercial estimate.

What Changed and What Never Did

What changed:

  • The gatekeeper. From the mission school and the colonial employer, to the degree and the state, to the newspaper and the bank recruitment drive, to the algorithm.
  • The evidence you carry. From testimonials, to a typed letter, to a Word document, to a live profile with proof of work.
  • Reach. A 1926 job seeker heard of work from a small circle. A 2026 job seeker sees thousands of vacancies, and so do thousands of competitors.
  • The size of the pool. Graduates were scarce in 1976 and are abundant now, which is why experience and age filters have grown, as we explain in our look at the worst entry-level job requirements.

What stayed the same:

  • People matter. Referrals and networking are older than every tool in this article. Bolles was pushing connections in 1970, referrals rose in the global surveys, and Nigerian readers will recognise the reality we discuss in connections versus merit in hiring.
  • Trust is the real currency. Testimonials in 1926, interview panels in 1976 and doubts about early online job sites in 2006 all show that employers and candidates are always trying to reduce risk.
  • Fraud follows opportunity. Wherever a new channel opens, fake offers follow.
  • Employers still use shortcuts. Gender and age were written into old adverts. Today the shortcuts are degree class, age caps and experience requirements.

Lessons for Nigerian Job Seekers

  1. Build your network deliberately. Every era rewarded people who were known. Today that means a visible profile and real conversations. See Be Seen, Be Skilled for the case that skill plus visibility beats silence.
  2. Treat your online profile as your modern testimonial. Employers read it before they read your application. An incomplete job board profile costs you offers, so finish yours.
  3. Fix the basics of your CV. The format has changed, but errors still sink applications. Read the 10 CV mistakes that cause instant rejection and what recruiters look for in a CV.
  4. Verify every offer. Check vacancies on the employer’s official channels and never pay to be hired.
  5. Prove skills, not just certificates. The scarcity premium on degrees has faded since the 1980s. Employers now look for evidence of what you can do.
  6. Use the tools your parents did not have. A short, honest cover letter, a clean profile and job alerts take less effort than queuing at an office, so use them well.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did people find jobs in Nigeria in the 1970s? We found no dataset that measures this. The context was a scarce supply of graduates, an oil-funded expansion of the public service and the Udoji reforms, which together made public-sector jobs close to automatic for many graduates until the 1980s.

When did online job boards start in Nigeria? Jobberman launched in August 2009, according to the BBC. Global sites such as Monster were already operating in the 1990s and early 2000s, but internet use in Nigeria was only about 5.5 percent in 2006.

When did the CV become standard? In the US, one researcher found that separate résumé sheets became common in the late 1930s and that job ads began asking for them from the 1950s, though most ads still did not request them until the mid-1980s. We found no equivalent Nigerian history.

Did people really apply in person? Yes. Until the 1980s many ads, at least in the US material we reviewed, told candidates to call or apply in person.

Is it easier or harder to find a job now? It is easier to see vacancies and harder to stand out. Graduate numbers are much larger than in 1976, so filters and competition are heavier.

Will AI change the job search again? Likely, but the evidence is still developing. The pattern from earlier eras suggests that tools change the route while trust, skill and relationships continue to decide who gets hired.

The Bottom Line

A century of job hunting in Nigeria runs from testimonials and mission-school clerks, through oil-boom graduates and bank recruitment drives, to profiles and algorithms. The tools have changed completely. The rules underneath have not: be known, be trusted, and be able to prove what you can do. Start by making your profile do that work for you, and run your CV through MyJobAlly’s Optimize Your CV tool.

This article draws on the Cambridge journal Africa, Cambridge University Press, the Journal of African History, the Universities of Bayreuth and Missouri, the University of Graz, the US Library of Congress, NISER, the Sokoto Educational Review, Vanguard, ThisDay, Brand Times, Quartz, BBC, Poynter, NPR, InternetNews, ERE, Workforce, Statistics of the World, Intelpoint, NapoleonCat, Africa Check, Profolio and Wikipedia, current as of October 2026. There is limited Nigerian research on how people searched for work in 1926, 1976 and 2006, so those sections combine economic and labour history with the evidence available, and we say where direct data is missing. Most job search surveys come from the US and are used as benchmarks only. Figures from surveys, blogs and vendor sources use different methods and may not be comparable. This article is general information, not career advice.