Kemisola is a CRM Manager in Lagos, Nigeria, with seven years in iGaming and marketing behind her. She has built CRM departments from scratch, grown teams and run full marketing campaigns.
The more she used her CRM tools, though, the more questions she had about them. Why does this tool behave this way? Why is this integration so flaky?
"It's a tool issue" wasn't a good enough answer for Kemi, so she went looking for the answer underneath, in the infrastructure the tools run on. She trained her social feeds to show her more of that kind of content, found NextWork on TikTok, and quietly started building, breaking and troubleshooting projects back to back.
Nearly six projects in silence
When Kemisola joined, she didn't introduce herself, she didn't join events and she didn't ask anyone for help. She completed nearly six projects before she posted anything at all.
What finally made her speak up was something she noticed while scrolling through the community: other learners were posting about the same errors, again and again - errors she had already worked through on her own. She recognized the frustration in those posts, and she recognized the hesitation to ask.
"I know what it's like to have questions and not know how to ask. I didn't want anyone else stuck there."
So she started answering questions. Then she started posting her own, and before long she was setting up live calls to walk other learners through the problems she'd already figured out.
Building the Lagos community
Today Kemisola is the NextWork Community Leader for Lagos, a chapter she started with her co-lead Bamise. What began as an ambitious idea now has more than 150 members, and most of it runs through a WhatsApp community where learners build NextWork projects together every week, post them on LinkedIn, hold each other accountable and troubleshoot their errors together in real time.
She does all of this on top of a demanding CRM role, being a mom and her own learning. She often joins live sessions at around 10pm Lagos time, once her kids are asleep and her work is done for the day. Along the way she has shared more than 18 NextWork projects on her own LinkedIn, run more than 10 community events, and coordinated an in-person NextWork meetup in Lagos.
"Don't be a ghost"
For someone who started out so quiet, Kemi is very vocal now about one thing in particular. Her advice to new learners starts with slowing down:
"My biggest tip is to slow down while working on the projects. Don't just aim to complete them - read, learn, and understand what the project is really teaching. Document your projects in your own words, share the lessons you're picking up, and network intentionally. Treat NextWork as more than a task list."
And to every one of those 150+ members in Lagos, she's blunt about visibility:
"Don't be a ghost. If you're not talking about your work, nobody will know you. There are thousands of people with skills… so what makes you different?"
Kemi, thank you for answering the questions you once didn't know how to ask, and for every 10pm session you've joined after a full day of work so that other learners in Lagos don't get stuck alone.