As the world has developed, the chorus of the need for leaders to give back to today’s youth has shifted from an indiscernible background hum to a tuneful melody played on every online streaming service in various ways. Interestingly, this outcry is irrespective of gender, race or wealth across the world. The anthropologists out there have helped us put a name to this generation – I think we call them Gen Z, or maybe it is Gen Y? I am still working that out! I genuinely believe that what is missing is mentoring.

Where do I start with such an important idea? Perhaps it will be best if I reflect on my own growth journey to make my case.

I recall sitting in front of this man, soaking in everything he said, with only one question on my mind: why didn’t I do this sooner? I was a wide-eyed young banker and had just been given my first project. It is important to mention that I was straight from Business School in the 1990s, keen and confident in my abilities. However, I was humble enough to discuss my thoughts with a senior colleague. My colleague was a master professional; just listening to him was like diving into a well of wisdom. Through his experiences, from leadership to team dynamics, the advice he gave was a true eye-opener for me. They say, “once you have seen, you cannot unsee”, and I had just gone from viewing in fuzzy black and white to Ultra HD. It was like hitting the jackpot!

I am sure you are wondering if this was the “inception moment” of a long, fruitful mentor-mentee dynamic. No, that did not happen. Instead, I just began to view in Ultra HD and recognised the value of diversity, perspective and constructive criticism. Although I did not know it at the time, this experience showed me how valuable it is to receive as a mentee and give back as a mentor.

Building Butterflies – No Substitute for Hardwork or Experience

A story is told of a well-meaning boy who observed the struggles of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon. Curious and kind, he chose to free it by gently cutting open the tightly wound casing. What he expected to be a resounding triumph of cooperation between humans and nature, to his horror, turned out to be precisely the opposite. The creature that came out resembled nothing like the beautiful work of art that flutters by in nature. This one was wiggly, stunted and had tiny wings. It hobbled on the ground, unable to fly and fulfil its true potential.

Nature, as we are increasingly becoming aware, has value embedded in every experience. In this case, the butterfly builds the strength it needs to fly by struggling, sometimes desperately, out of its cocoon. I am sure there is a catchphrase amongst the butterfly community: no struggle, no flight. Unfortunately, the empathetic boy, who identified with the struggle of another living thing and wanted to help, had inadvertently deprived it of the very thing it needed.

Mentorship can be, and usually is, a great help, but it is no substitute for hard work or experience. For clarity view in Ultra HD, it is not about getting quick answers to the test or challenge faced but to see and understand for oneself how perseverance can lead to success. Great mentors acknowledge that challenges are vital to the development of leaders, and whilst offering support, they do not interfere with the process of growth.

Much has been written over the years about mentorship, from definitions to famous examples of successful mentorships. So, allow me a slightly different path; let me share how in my experience, the virtuous circle of mentorship is a two-way street, full of lessons for both mentor and mentee.

I have learnt, both as a mentee and mentor, that the relationship thrives on shared vulnerability. Being open with a person, especially those more junior to you, exposes some of your less desirable traits, which can be incredibly challenging. However, remember, you are helping someone to see more clearly and to look at the clearer picture with greater depth and understanding. With this style of mentorship, your mentee will undoubtedly see your rough edges and patches. However, vulnerability is not a weakness. I firmly contend that professional vulnerability is an increasingly important strength in leaders today. I believe that honesty in any thriving mentorship relationship makes both the mentor and mentee better. So, in order to help the Gen X’s, or Gen Z’s get to grips with the grounded picture of reality, here are a few of my stories that I hope will resonate and inspire.

The growth paradox

I have learnt from mentors, open enough to share their experience with me, the errors they made in their journey to the top. At the risk of looking less impressive, they shared their missteps, their regrets and most importantly, what they would have done differently. Nobody gets to the top without making mistakes. It takes being secure in your abilities and your own journey to bring a trusted junior into your professional inner circle and give them a peek behind the curtain. Let us pause for a moment and imagine the value of that conversation to the mentee, to see a revered leader talk about how they had failed. Practically, they have just gained years of wisdom in a fraction of the time. Emotionally, formatively, the mentee becomes less critical of themselves and more accepting of their mistakes. Their challenges are part of their journey (remember the butterfly) and thus a learning experience. Success is built on the foundation of lessons learned from decisions that did not work out. Mentees learn to fail fast, succeed faster, and thus, move forward and upward. That is the paradox of growth.

A mirror that is a window to the future

Similarly, mentorship allows the mentor to see how far they have come. I recall times, often very vividly, in places that I had closed off, when I had to deal with many challenging situations. I led teams comprising of colleagues older than me. I managed egos of young and ambitious professionals who had attended the best schools, gotten the best grades and were constantly consuming articles on billion-dollar startups and million-dollar bonuses and therefore did not see the need to listen to me. There were moments where I felt so overwhelmed, but I drew on my inner strength and just like the butterfly emerging from the cocoon, I pulled through. The new skills I learnt, the competencies I built, the hard work it took, have made me a better, more empathetic leader.

In all of this, the mentee is given hope to keep keeping on. They recognise that their leaders did not just magically appear; like them, their journey was fraught with many a banana skin. Through a mentor-mentee relationship, the mentee is helped to navigate the sometimes-choppy waters of the corporate world, and in so doing, they become more empowered to pass their own lessons on to others. The virtuous circle builds mentor and mentee, and the next generation all stand to benefit together.

Time is Priceless

Throughout our journey, we constantly need to go back to the basics. Our return to the fundamentals keeps us grounded. It is these same principles that guide the next generation of leaders. What changes, however, are the “ology’s” (technology, methodology and psychology). The mentor is investing in the future by passing these principles onto their mentee. The mentee takes the base principle, applies the current “ology”, and repackages it appropriate for a generation. The more leaders embrace professional vulnerability and pour themselves into their juniors in a relationship built on trust, the more things improve over time.

By virtue of age, mentees are often more adept at the technology that makes life and work easier. Learning solid and time-tested principles enables the mentee to stand firm on what works while finding more empowered ways to achieve the same thing. Time is a priceless constant, and by learning the ideologies (another “ology”) of today’s leaders, tomorrow’s decision-makers do not reinvent the wheel but use it as a basis for things appropriate to their time that we are yet to imagine.

Here today, further tomorrow

If mentoring is giving back to enrich others and the world around us, will you reach out to bring along a junior colleague? Will you find a mentor yourself today? As we pour ourselves into the lives of others, we will see ourselves grow, the next generation mature, and the whole world blossom just a little bit more. “He that watereth shall be watered also himself.”

The writer is Abena Osei-Poku, Managing Director of Absa Bank Ghana.

Want to find out what are your responsibilities being a UI/UX designer?  You may know or you may not but UI/UX designers at IDEO and Red Antler earn an annual fortune of $91,500. This is approximately the highest salary for a designer with minimum experience. That being said, a massive confusion for UI/UX designers occurs when it comes to writing UX designer job roles and responsibilities. And there are a plethora of potential UX design work-related roles to which you must adhere.

In this post, we’ll show you how to decode and comprehend all of the various types of UX designer obligations, as well as provide some helpful answers that will encourage UI/UX designers to relish their positions. We’ll also look at a variety of other details such as the different roles of entitled designers, so let’s get started!

What is a UI/UX design?

UI and UX design are among the most frequently misunderstood and intertwined words on the internet. And it’s understandable. They’re normally classified together as UI/UX design online, as they appear to describe the same thing. It’s often difficult to find strong definitions of the two that won’t devolve into a single terminology. Having said that, let’s take a look at the definitions:

UI design

UI design originates from “user interface and it is typically a graphical layout or visual design. It includes many keys that users click, the text on the screen, the illustrations, drop-down menus, text input areas, and all of the other items with which the users can interact. Here, every visual element, interaction, and animation the layout of the screen, turning points, interface animations, and each micro-interaction must be fully developed.

UX design

The term “UX” refers to “user experience” and how a user interacts with the app determines their experience with it. A great UX design makes the experience smooth and intuitive, whereas a bad UX design makes the experience clunky and confusing. This entails navigating the app while visualizing it as either logical or arbitrary. UX ensures that apps give people the impression that they are efficiently completing the tasks they set out to accomplish rather than viewing it as a struggle. The ease or difficulty with which the user interface elements created by the UI designers can be interacted with determines the user experience.

What is the role of a UI/UX designer?

It’s also debatable whether UI designers or UX designers create the exact wireframe rendering of interface interactions and solicit user feedback. To answer this question, you must first distinguish between the two designers in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of how users prefer to interact with their applications:

Role of a UI designer

Working on an app’s appearance is what UI designers formally do. Your job is to select color arrangements and icon patterns, as well as line widths and text formatting. The visual appearance of an application’s considering user interface is maintained by UI designers. As you may already know, Graphic designers are UI designers. Your responsibility is to ensure that the application’s interface is appealing, aesthetically appealing, and suitably customized to complement the app’s objective and individuality. That being said, you must ensure that every single visual element feels cohesive, both aesthetically and functionally.

Role of a UX designer

UX designers are also involved with the user interface of an application, which is why people are curious about the distinction between the two. However, whereas UI designers are in a better position to decide how the user interface will appear, UX designers are in place to determine how the user interface will function. As designers, you work on the interface’s composition and function, as well as the arrangements and how many of the parts, interact with one another. In short, UX designers ensure that the interface works properly.

So, how do UI and UX relate together?

Mutual coordination and interaction between UI and UX designers certainly assist to ensure that the entire user experience is excellent and organic. A UX designer determines how the user interface functions, whereas a UI designer governs how the user interface appears. This is a complex and dynamic process, and the two design teams frequently collaborate. The UI team is focused on how most of these interface elements will show up on screen while the UX team works on the rhythm of the app, how all of the icons navigate you across your tasks, as well as how the interface productively provides the data user needs. For example, during the design process, it is decided that additional buttons should be added to a specific screen. This will alter how the buttons must be organized or changed to a specific shape or size.

What are the responsibilities of UI/UX designers?

UI/UX designer responsibilities will include the following:

• Recognizing business requirements and user feedback to create user-centered design
• Establish user streams, schematic capture, blueprints, and mockups
• Designing style guides, design systems, design patterns, and appealing user interfaces from requirements
• Design and carry out user research as well as industry trends.
• Data interpretation and empirical feedback
• Creating user interface elements like control mechanisms, navigational elements, and instructional aspects
• Creating unique graphic designs (e.g. images, sketches, and tables)
• Defining and diagnosing UX issues (for example, responsiveness)
• Construct user stories, personas, and storyboards.
• Establish sitemaps and determine the information architecture.
• Successfully cooperating with the product, engineering, and management teams
• Improve user experience, incorporate customer feedback, usage metrics, and accessibility observations into the design.
• Follow iterative and progressive usability sessions in which real users interact with scaled versions of certain functionality or visual designs are put to test determining whether the designers are on the right track.
• Each iteration incorporates feedback
• Make wireframes and prototypes.
• Perform usability testing

Now, let us take a look at UI/UX designer responsibilities associated with various job descriptions according to careerfoundry.com are as follows:

UI/UX designer responsibilities as an Analyst

• Create routines and task lists for UX design projects.
• Work with Program Managers, Marketing, Customer Success, and Sales to develop a solid knowledge of consumer preferences
• Establish a well-structured, real worth plan to implement solid UX design.
• All fundamental precepts of the product design process should be documented.
• Perform research to determine user requirements.

UI/UX designer responsibilities as a Strategist

• Convert business and user requirements, as well as technical challenges, into estimation methods that are significant, convenient, and interactive.
• Enable workshops to respond to critical business questions by using instructional design, functional prototypes, and increase customer engagement.
• Mentor and assist with the project lifecycle discovery, including workshops. Interviews with users and stakeholders, analytics, audits and benchmarking
• Use quantitative and qualitative research to generate meaningful insights that will inspire creative ideas.

UI/UX designer responsibilities as an Architect

• Collaborate with the UX researcher to identify users’ needs and learn how they consume and navigate content (a task analysis can help with this).
• Conduct an evaluation of the current information architecture and identify areas for improvements, such as content inventories and audits.
• Propose and style the information architecture for the website or app; where should the information go or which factors play an important role
• Make use cases, flow diagrams, and information hierarchies.
• Classify and Label Information
• Construct wireframes as well as taxonomies.

Final thoughts

Coming to the end of this feature, to create an excellent user interface/experience, both UI and UX designs are to be tremendously attractive & accurate with pre-existing user expectations.

Once UI and UX are in sync, the effects can be spectacular.

If you are looking for a new scenic destination to visit, these nine locations will make your vacation worthwhile

The Tropics Group of Companies presents its 5th Annual TROPICS BUSINESS SUMMIT (TBS) which will take place virtually, from October 12-16, 2021. The theme for this year’s Summit, Accelerating the Transition to Circular Economy, will focus on eight key sectors for pan-African economies offering opportunities for investors in Finance and Capital Investment, Infrastructure, Energy, Agriculture, Consumer Products (FMCG), Sustainable Tourism, Telecommunications and Technology, linked to the economy including industrial ecology or the economy of functionality.

This four-day event draws on a multicultural community of investors seeking new markets’ opportunities, governments seeking to attract new investment, entrepreneurs/startups seeking capital investment or new ecosystems to help them thrive. The Summit will bring together a cross section of world class leaders, key global policy and decision makers, government officials, international investors, with ideas and insights to help formulate investment strategies, business leaders from all sectors at the forefront of global investment trends, investment offices, CEOs, heads of asset classes, small and medium business owners, influencers, innovators and senior investment staff directly or indirectly managing assets for institutional investor entities across Africa.

The digital format of the event will offer innovative content and feature 100+ virtual sessions, virtual deal room, marketplace and service providers, and a robust networking platform where Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone, Hispanophone and Arabophone participants can make the connections they need to push their investments forward.

In addition to the four-day event, TBS will host two pitch competitions, before the Summit in October – Tropics Startups Pitch Competition on the 24th of September 2021 and the Tropics Women in Business Pitch-Day on the 25th of September 2021, both in search of the most promising startups where entrepreneurs will showcase their innovative products and solutions to global audience of major investors and industry leaders. Winners will be able to walk away with a chance to win over $800,000 in grant and cash prizes from financial institutions, investment companies, venture capitalists and institutional partners.

Venicia Guinot, Chairwoman and Executive Chair and Founder of Tropics Business Summit says, “This year’s summit will give participants access to valuable content, global exposure, and build relevant connections with the different actors of the innovation ecosystem. Our annual Summit is where strategic and deal-making gatherings of startup business angels, venture capital and innovation leaders from Africa, the Caribbean and around the globe meet.”

Tropics Business Summit (TBS) is an action and results-oriented business forum connecting 54 African countries to the rest of the world. The Summit takes place yearly in the month of October as a global, livestream event. It is a deal-making marketplace, where the summit organizers, along with their global partners, position the African continent as a key investment destination, forge new synergies and structure new deals that will help close the funding gap between Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone and Arabophone markets. Businesses benefit from the opportunity to talk with representatives from Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), corporations, investors, incubators, business accelerators, trade commissioners, and more, receiving advice on market development and access to foreign emerging markets.

Register to watch the TROPICS BUSINESS SUMMIT at home or from work, free on the web; global viewers need to register at hello@tropicsbusinesssummit.com to book their virtual seats in advance. Alternatively, you can register at Eventbrite to TROPICS BUSINESS SUMMIT 2021

If you don’t know what it is, it’s a relatively new B2c online shopping app where people can advertise their products and services in few simple steps.

When I first heard about it, I thought it was just another usual online shopping App, except for me to find
out some outstanding features.

Fortunately, I managed to get access to the app and explored it over the weekend. I will say, it’s nowhere near what I expected it to be at all.

The best way I can describe the app is this: Atonzo is an app where you can basically advertise anything at all like electronics, fashion, properties, even job vacancies. And now, I can see why the platform has over 100 verified sellers in less that 6 months, since they launched it.

They took the concept of B2C shopping platforms (i.e. jij, tonaton and olx) and brought it to a whole new level. Even though there’s no Ios app Yet, as far as I know, the android app was released september 2021.

Personally, I can see it a great alternative to tonaton, jiji and olx. I’m not sure if I can say the same for other platforms. But, one thing is for sure, it seems like a great way to market your business, which’ll lead to more revenue and customers.

Now some other interesting things i found about this app is it allows you to post unlimited ads for free with little or no restrictions. the app gives you a direct integrated whats app button so that you can easily reach product owners
directly without having to save their numbers first before whatsapping them.

So far so good i can say its one of the fastest and simplest online shopping site i have used so far. After all that i made contact with the site owner,  Daniel Agblo, in my conversation with him he told me atonzo is a step ahead with combating fraudulent activities engaging in recent time online shopping cases. Apparently the site verifies sellers in an unusual way, registered sellers are made to verify their identities on a video call and some other interesting ways, he mentioned.

He continued by saying ,online marketing companies like atonzo.com play a crucial role in helping businesses boost their branding and sales online. Nowadays without some online marketing, a business is not going to be achieving its full potential because so much is done online. You reach more customers, it reaches beyond local marketing to global proportions and it helps keep you relevant in your industry when there is likely a lot of competition.

Downlaod the atonzo app via link[ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.appatonzo.atonzo ]