Elon Musk’s Tesla hunting for engineering minds from Kenya

By Rawlexx79

Tesla’s Senior Director of Engineering, Charles Mwangi has hinted of the company’s desire to have Kenyan minds in its engineering team.

Mwangi, who spoke at a fireside chat on Next Generation manufacturing, said the American green energy multinational corporation is recruiting talent from Kenya to work its California factory.

Tesla specialises in manufacturing electric vehicles and powering solutions for homes and industries.

At the event organised by advisory firm Dalberg, Mwangi said anyone who survived Kenya’s 8-4-4 education system can survive anywhere.

Mwangi joined the company in 2012 and has revealed that the Tesla Human Resource team is expected in the country in a few weeks to screen prospective employees.

A number of Kenyans are already working at Tesla, which has been actively hiring in the past few months. Importantly, this comes just a few days after Kenyans were ranked the third most hardworking foreigners in the United States – by a 2018 Bloomberg report.

The report, which put the number of Kenyans living and working legally in the US at 120,000, says that Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Nepal have the highest number of citizens pursuing higher education in the US, after Saudi Arabia.

Kenyan immigrants in the US were ranked the third most industrious after Ghanaians and Bulgarians at positions one and two. Ghana and Bulgaria scored 75.2% and 74.2%, respectively.

Ethiopia was ranked 4th, Egypt 5th, Nigeria 8th and Liberia 9th in the report.

The Bloomberg report shows that Africans are generally the most productive – in comparison to their Mexican and Central American counterparts.

Bloomberg journalist Justin Fox, who came up with the report said, “If we want more highly skilled and hardworking English-speaking immigrants obviously the place to go for them is Africa.”

The report was developed from the 2016 US Census Bureau American Community Survey.

Source: African Strategic-Ventures (ASV) & The Exchange.