From 200 to 1800 employees, Tek Experts’ 3 years journey in Nigeria

Three years ago, enterprise support company, Tek Experts launched its operations in Nigeria with 200 technical engineers. Yesterday, the team announced that it has hit a milestone of over 1,800 employees in Nigeria, making it the largest market of its operations globally.

Managing Director for Africa, Tek Experts and Elev8, Lars Johannisson shared their experience of the business ecosystem and the team’s social impact so far.

Tek Experts is part of the YNV group, a global holding company that was established in 2010. The group presently hold a total of 5 brands across major 3 sectors- technology, education, development- across 5 continents and 9 countries with 5000 Employees.

These include Tek Experts, a company that offers deep technical support and professional services for blue-chip technology companies; Elev8, an IT training and executive education academy; Wize, a software platform that helps to develop talent; Everty, an arm that owns, develops and manages world-class real estate; and Monifai, a fintech company that provide safe and secure loans through with a pilot in Costa-Rica at the moment.

According to Lars, perhaps the team’s greatest achievement has been creating a system that enables it to consistently provide deep, technical IT support and professional services to some of the world’s largest technology brands in the country. When asked if the team supports public sector players as well, Lars confirmed that they have supported agencies that especially used Microsoft products.

He explained that having Nigeria as its largest market of operations globally is a testament to the company’s commitment to developing the tech support sector in Nigeria and Africa whilst nurturing talents in the country through the help of its sister company, Elev8.

“We recognize that tech support is instrumental in driving our customers’ brand and overall customer experience. We are uniquely positioned to help companies leverage the existing investments they make in customer support to drive product adoption, increase renewal rates, and ultimately top-line revenue growth. Many of the services we offer to our customers require technical expertise and we invest very heavily in digital skilling and employee development, growing a skilled workforce for the ICT industry.”

– Managing Director for Africa, Tek Experts and Elev8, Lars Johannisson

He explained that maintaining a positive and progressive work culture helped the company to achieve significant growth. “Here, we offer both a place to develop IT skills and a place to leverage those skills with job opportunities supporting some of the most cutting-edge technology for the biggest global brands”, he said.

The team partnered to drive an upskilling and job placement initiative for girls with no IT background in 2018. With two cohorts graduated, that has with two cohorts 40 girls and gave them employment.

The first group of trainees was ten female Software Engineers who commenced and ended their training in September 2019. In 2020, another set of 10 Nigerian women benefited from the partnership between the two tech companies. The team shared the experience of Ikiokaye Idowu who joined the team from the banking sector with zero experience in tech and rose to become a manager with the team.

In 2019, the team grew from 200 to 1000, becoming one of the highest employers of labour in Nigeria’s IT sector and winning a Jobberman’s award of the “best place to work” to its Merit. Tek Experts has scaled its Africa operations into Rwanda. The Rwanda site was officially launched in 2021.

Speaking about sister company, told us that Tek Experts recently moved to a new facility, EvertyOne which is owned by sister company, Everty Real Estate. The 12 story facility houses all of Tek Experts’ Nigeria operations and boasts of a fully functional gym and a clinic, dedicated to employees only.