Career
Translate Your Job Title Into Skills That Travel
You have been an Admin Officer for five years and every remote or international role you look at asks for skills you are sure you do not have. You already do most of them, every week, under a different name.
Nigerian job titles are elastic. Admin Officer can mean vendor negotiation, payroll reconciliation, procurement, facilities management, and staff onboarding all in one person. Remote-first employers and recruiters abroad do not hire titles, they hire against capability descriptions - and if your CV leads with a title instead of a capability, the first filter never sees you at all.
Do an inventory. List every task you actually performed in the last 90 days, group them into no more than six capability clusters, then rename each cluster in the language the market uses: vendor management, procurement, stakeholder communication, operations reporting, budget control. Attach volume and evidence to each - how many vendors, what value, in which tools, over how long. Volume is what converts a claim into a credential.
Two cautions. This is translation, not fiction: if you have never done it, do not name it, because the interview will find the gap in four minutes. And the exercise will expose real holes - usually a tool rather than a skill, which is a cheap problem to fix in a few weekends. Most people discover they are one vocabulary away from being visible, not one degree away.
In practice
A church administrator in Abeokuta managed a ₦40m annual budget, sixty volunteers, a duty rota, and three suppliers. For a year she applied for operations roles under the title Church Administrator and heard nothing. She rewrote the top of her CV as Operations and Volunteer Programme Management, listed the budget figure, the headcount and the supplier count, and spent three weekends learning Notion because it kept appearing in job adverts. Her next application, to a remote-first company, ended in an offer at more than twice her previous pay.
Titles describe where you sat. Skills describe what you can do anywhere.
Action step
List every task you have done in the past 90 days, group them under no more than six capability headings, and rewrite the top of your CV using those headings with one number attached to each.