Kemisola

Kemisola's story

Kemisola is a CRM Manager based in Lagos, with seven years of experience in the high-pressure world of iGaming and marketing. She’s built CRM departments from scratch, grown teams, and orchestrated marketing campaigns.

Over time, as Kemi continues to use her CRM tools, new questions started to emerge: Why does this tool behave this way? Why is this integration flaky?

Instead of accepting “it’s a tool issue,” she went down the stack… into infrastructure and cloud! She trained her social feeds to show her cloud content, found NextWork on TikTok, and quietly started to build, break, troubleshoot and complete projects back to back.

From silence, to service

When Kemisola joined NextWork, she didn’t introduce herself to the community, join any events, or ask for help.

In fact, she completed nearly six projects before she ever posted anything. But what eventually made her speak up wasn’t a confidence boost or a big win - it was something quieter than that.

She scrolled through the community and noticed other learners posting about the same errors again and again, errors she’d already solved on her own. She recognized the frustration, the confusion, 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 began posting her own. Before long, Kemisola was setting up live calls to walk others through the problems she’d already figured out.

Building a community

Today, Kemisola is NextWork Community Leader for Lagos, Nigeria, which she started with her co-lead Bamise. What began as an ambitious idea is now a local chapter of 150+ members, running mainly through a WhatsApp community where learners:

• Build NextWork projects together every week
• Post their projects on LinkedIn
• Hold each other accountable
• Share their errors
• Troubleshoot in real time

Kemisola’s doing this on top of her demanding CRM role, motherhood, and her own AWS learning journey. She often joins global NextWork sessions late at night - around 10pm in Lagos - after her kids are asleep and her work is done. She’s shared 18+ NextWork projects on her own LinkedIn, ran 10+ events in the community, and coordinated an in-person NextWork meetup in Lagos.

With all 150+ members that join Kemi’s Lagos community, she’s vocal about one thing: if you want opportunities, you can’t be invisible.

“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?”