Positioning for global opportunities starts long before anyone looks

It is tempting to treat positioning as the visible part: a refreshed profile, a new display picture, another webinar. Glory Oguegbu, founder of the Renewable Energy Technology Training Institute in Nigeria, began her GEPA leadership talk on positioning for global opportunities by questioning its title. Global opportunity is not one thing, she argues. Decide which kind you want and what must be in place first; most of that work happens before anyone outside can see it.

The session is framed in Christian faith, as GEPA sessions are, but Oguegbu rejects the belief that faith alone makes things fall into place. You have to work as hard as colleagues who do not share it, and be deliberately excellent in every assignment.

A why you have seen for yourself

Entering the energy sector because energy transition is trending on LinkedIn, Oguegbu says, is failing at the start. Know what you are drawn to and be honest about your stage. At most stages the right move is to accept opportunities that develop you, not to position globally yet.

Her own why began with a WWF climate campaign image that stayed with her for almost a year, and it hardened on a United Nations project in Ghana in 2015, where she watched the fish a coastal community depended on wash up dead. Her research found seventy per cent of Nigerians unaware of climate change and only Western material to learn from, so she wrote books for an African readership.

The years when nothing works

Nobody wanted those books. Oguegbu argues that you do not truly hold a value until the real world has tested it, and she is plain about her own test. She went round Lagos asking to wash cars because she had no money to eat. She walked between schools to save the next fare and approached more than two hundred before one accepted her climate club programme. That head teacher offered, for twelve visits a term, less than a day of her transport money.

The same books and programme, she says, became a climate leadership fellowship that a major Nigerian bank has funded for five years; by her count it has reached 180 schools, 60,000 students and 123,000 community members across the 36 states. Her lesson is that the people who failed on time succeeded faster. Test early, and document every bit of impact.

Proof, then visibility

She sets out practical steps:

• Speak to the people you intend to serve. An engineer in Kenya she advised was designing an energy meter for factories that existing meters already served, without having spoken to one manufacturer.
• Use AI to get smarter and refine an idea you already own, never to generate it.
• Learn your top five strengths from a paid assessment. Her leading strength is strategic, so she hired someone whose first strength is execution.
• Tie your work to named global goals. Hers are clean energy, climate action and education.
• Read newsletters, reports and projections so you know where your sector is moving.

Then make the work seen. Tell your story, volunteer, and write every post as though the most important person in the world will read it. Excellence that nobody sees, she says, is like dressing well, then covering yourself with a blanket before going out.

Moving before the outcome is certain

In 2015, soon after first hearing the term renewable energy at a lecture in the United States, Oguegbu could find only one renewable energy event in Nigeria: an Abuja conference whose 80,000 naira fee she could not pay. She travelled anyway, planning to sit outside and meet delegates at lunch. After about two hours the fee was waived and she was brought in. In the lunch queue a stranger asked whether she was Glory and told her she had been nominated for an energy champion award. She was one of three nominees, and she won.

Her conclusion is that God does not call the qualified but qualifies the called, and tests people with hardship first. None of it, she says, would have happened had she stayed in Lagos.

The full course, taught from the workshop recording, is in the catalogue.