From Nearly 300 Job Applications to Building Dataleum: How Bode Roberts Turned Rejection Into Opportunity

For three years, Bode Roberts treated finding a job almost like a full-time occupation.
He submitted nearly 300 applications, attended 48 interviews and repeatedly reached stages where employment appeared possible, only for another rejection or silence to follow.
The experience eventually became more than a difficult period in his career.
It helped shape the business he would later build.
Today, Roberts is the co-founder and chief executive of Dataleum, a Nigerian education technology company focused on helping people develop practical digital and business skills.
But the idea behind Dataleum grew partly from Roberts’ own experience of struggling to find an opportunity despite his education and willingness to work.
Three years of searching
Roberts has spoken publicly about how difficult the unemployment period became.
After completing university, he spent roughly three years trying to enter the workforce.
He applied widely, attended dozens of interviews and dealt repeatedly with the disappointment of getting close to a job without ultimately receiving an offer.
In an earlier account of the period, Roberts said he sometimes avoided social events because of his financial situation and struggled with the emotional pressure that came with being unemployed.
He eventually secured a job at Access Bank, an opportunity he has described as particularly meaningful because of how long he had spent searching.
But his unemployment experience had already changed the way he thought about work and opportunity.
Instead of seeing unemployment only as an individual problem, Roberts began thinking about the wider gap between capable people and the opportunities available to them.
One idea would remain central to his later work:
“Talent is universal, but opportunity is not.”
Seeing inequality early
Roberts’ interest in unequal access to opportunity began before his own job search.
He attended private school while his mother worked as a teacher in the public-school system.
When he accompanied her to work, he says he saw overcrowded classrooms, children sitting on floors and students struggling to access the same quality of education available elsewhere.
Those experiences helped shape his belief that ability alone does not determine how far someone can go.
Access matters too.
Roberts also developed an early interest in mathematics and entrepreneurship.
He studied Computer Engineering at Covenant University from 2009 and says he experimented heavily with business while still an undergraduate.
Rather than focusing only on academics, he used university as an opportunity to try different businesses and learn directly about customers, suppliers, marketing and sales.
He says he started around 16 small ventures during that period.
He graduated in 2014 and later studied Production and Operations Management, broadening his interest from technology itself to how technology can be used to improve the way organisations operate.
The problem that became Dataleum
Roberts’ eventual move into banking exposed another gap.
Even after getting a professional job, he found that obtaining practical and affordable opportunities to develop new digital skills could still be difficult.
He discussed the problem with Titilola Bello, who would later become his Dataleum co-founder.
They began asking a wider question.
If working professionals were finding it difficult to access affordable digital training, what did that mean for graduates and unemployed young people trying to enter increasingly technology-driven workplaces?
Before turning the idea into a company, Roberts and Bello tested whether people actually wanted such a service.
According to Roberts, they initially spoke with 20 people, with 15 confirming that affordable digital-skills training was something they needed.
Their first marketing effort attracted 27 interested people.
Then an organisation paid upfront for 10 training slots.
That became some of Dataleum’s earliest revenue.
Rather than raising large amounts of money immediately and attempting to expand quickly, the founders began building gradually.
From a Lagos training centre to online learning
Dataleum initially operated largely through physical training.
The company focused on areas such as data analytics, business analysis and other skills increasingly needed by employers.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.
Seven months after Dataleum launched, restrictions introduced in 2020 made its physical training model difficult to maintain.
Instead of waiting for normal activity to resume, the company moved more of its programmes online.
One of the experiments was a virtual data competition called Datathon, which brought analysts from different locations together remotely.
For Roberts, the response demonstrated something important.
Dataleum did not necessarily need everyone to be physically present in Lagos.
Training could reach people much farther away.
The disruption caused by the pandemic therefore became an opportunity to reconsider the company's scale.
Recognition follows
As Dataleum expanded, it began receiving recognition within Nigeria’s technology and startup ecosystem.
In 2022, the company received the Startup of the Year award at Art of Technology Lagos.
The following year, Dataleum was named Best EdTech Startup in Africa at the Global Startup Awards Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The award was independently reported at the time and is also listed in Dataleum’s own impact report.
For a company that had begun with a small feasibility exercise and its first group of paying trainees, the recognition marked a significant step in its development.
Expansion into the United Kingdom
Dataleum also moved beyond Nigeria.
A UK company under the Dataleum name was incorporated in July 2023, according to Companies House records.
Its UK operation now offers courses including data analytics, business analysis and project management.
But expanding into Britain presented a different problem from the one Dataleum had faced in Nigeria.
Roberts said the company encountered African immigrants and members of underrepresented communities who had qualifications and experience but still found it difficult to navigate the British labour market.
That pushed Dataleum to place greater emphasis on community support and employability rather than treating education simply as the delivery of technical courses.
The broader goal became helping people translate skills into actual economic opportunities.
From job seeker to employer and builder
That evolution gives Roberts’ story an unusual symmetry.
Years earlier, he had struggled to convince an employer to give him an opportunity.
Now he runs a company built around helping other people become better prepared for opportunities of their own.
His focus has also shifted as Dataleum has grown.
Roberts says his early leadership style was heavily operational. He was involved directly in much of what the company did.
But managing a growing organisation required learning to delegate and develop other leaders.
He now describes the next stage of his career as becoming more of a builder of systems and people than someone responsible for every daily decision.
A bigger question for Africa
Roberts sees Dataleum’s mission as part of a much larger problem facing the continent.
Africa has one of the world’s youngest populations and produces large numbers of graduates every year.
At the same time, employers frequently complain about skills shortages, while millions of young Africans struggle to find stable employment.
Those two realities can exist together when the skills people learn do not always match the skills employers are seeking.
The growth of remote work has created another possibility.
Africans with the right skills increasingly have opportunities to work for organisations outside their home countries without necessarily relocating.
That means digital education can potentially connect African workers not only to local jobs but to a global labour market.
For companies such as Dataleum, the challenge is therefore no longer simply teaching people to use a particular software tool.
Training has to help learners become capable of solving real business problems and competing for actual employment.
Artificial intelligence enters the picture
Roberts is also studying how artificial intelligence could reshape African businesses.
He is pursuing doctoral research at Covenant University focused on the impact of AI on operational efficiency in systemically important banks.
The subject reflects a wider transition taking place across the technology sector.
Skills that were considered valuable only a few years ago are changing rapidly as AI automates parts of data analysis, software development, customer service and business operations.
For training companies, that means courses cannot remain static.
Workers will increasingly need to understand how to use AI alongside traditional technical and analytical skills.
Rejection became part of the foundation
Roberts does not describe his years of unemployment as wasted time.
The experience exposed him directly to the frustration of having skills and ambition while lacking access to the opportunity needed to prove them.
Eventually, that frustration helped shape the problem he wanted to solve.
His journey does not mean every rejected job applicant should become an entrepreneur, nor does entrepreneurship remove the structural causes of unemployment.
But it demonstrates how firsthand experience of a problem can sometimes become valuable knowledge when building a solution.
For Roberts, the transition has been striking.
He went from repeatedly asking organisations for an opportunity to helping build a company intended to create opportunities for others.
And after years when rejection made his future uncertain, his longer-term ambition now stretches well beyond his own career.
Roberts says he wants Dataleum to contribute to an African talent ecosystem capable not only of consuming global technology, but also of producing skills and innovation that can be exported to the rest of the world.