For Ore Badmus, survival has been the thread connecting a career spanning acting, dance instruction, and marketing.
Over the past fifteen years, she has moved between professions, navigating financial uncertainty, and the challenge of starting over. Each transition has demanded something different, but they’ve all taught her lessons about ambition, adaptability, and the importance of being seen.
Badmus grew up in a middle-class family where her needs were met. As she got older, however, her family’s financial circumstances changed, reshaping her understanding of security and what it would take to achieve it.
At Obafemi Awolowo University, she began pursuing her childhood dream of becoming an actor. Her early opportunities included a role in Tinsel, the long-running Nigerian television drama. She spent nearly a year on the show before leaving for Nigeria’s mandatory National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme in Bayelsa State.
The move complicated her efforts to build an acting career. Much of Nigeria’s film industry is concentrated in Lagos, several hours away by road. From Bayelsa, attending auditions and travelling for productions became increasingly difficult, and the career she had begun building was harder to sustain.
Meanwhile, another professional path was beginning to take shape. Nigeria’s NYSC programme combines an initial three-week orientation camp with an eleven-month placement at an organisation.
During camp, she joined the broadcasting team and led her platoon’s dance team. Her involvement caught the attention of people who could help her professionally.
A referral eventually led to a communications executive position at a non-governmental organisation, where she worked throughout her service year.
After completing her service, Badmus returned to Lagos determined to establish herself as a professional actor. But although she secured occasional roles, the work rarely provided enough income to make her financially comfortable.
When a family friend mentioned an opening for a dance teacher, Badmus initially dismissed the suggestion. The position promised stability, but teaching held little appeal for someone who had watched her mother work in the profession. Moreover, it meant taking a step away from a career path she’d always wanted.
A conversation with a mentor eventually changed her mind. She accepted the position, resolved to give it her best, and continued pursuing opportunities beyond the classroom. At the time, she could not have known that the decision would become a bridge to an entirely different career.
An unexpected entry into tech
By 2020, Badmus was thirty and juggling several responsibilities. She was still teaching dance, supplementing her income through private lessons, and running small businesses.
From the outside, she was keeping things together; internally, however, she felt increasingly dissatisfied with the life she was building.
“It always just felt like I was made for more than the straws I was grasping for,” she recalls.
That year, a friend tagged her in a LinkedIn post announcing that uLesson, a Nigerian education technology company, was hiring. The company’s chief executive, Sim Shagaya, subsequently reached out, and, following some delays, she received an offer to join as one of three creative leads in 2021. Her experience teaching kids came in handy this time as uLesson was creating a content library at the time.
She was out with friends at a karaoke bar when the offer arrived. The salary was ₦600,000, six times what she had been earning as a dance teacher. It was the kind of financial leap she had been hoping to make, yet the moment carried some emotional complication.
“It was a bit of a conundrum because it felt like I was leaving my dream of acting,” she says.
uLesson became the first point in a marketing career that has now seen her work at Eyowo, PaidHR, and Maplerad.
Learning to start again
When Badmus secured approval for a UK Global Talent visa, another transition came into view.
The visa offered a route to relocation, but before leaving Nigeria, she needed to find an employer willing to take a chance on her experience.
The search proved more difficult than she anticipated. She applied for more than a hundred positions before securing a role, encountering a recurring problem along the way.
Although her applications frequently progressed beyond the CV screening stage, interviews with hiring managers often ended without an offer.
Initially, she struggled to understand what was going wrong. Her experience was relevant, and she could demonstrate that she had performed many of the responsibilities listed in job descriptions. Yet getting through the application process was not the same as convincing employers that she was right for a particular position.
The breakthrough came when she recognised a difference between Nigerian and British product marketing practices.
Her experience in Nigeria had required her to handle a broad range of responsibilities. During interviews, she continued presenting that breadth of experience even when applying for more specialised roles.
A recruiter eventually offered feedback that helped her reconsider her approach and focus on the particular skills and experience each position demanded.
She also had to adjust to a different understanding of professional achievement. In Nigeria, she was accustomed to discussing what her team had accomplished, emphasising collective results over individual contributions.
British employers, she found, wanted clearer evidence of what she herself had delivered and the decisions she had made.
She lost one opportunity after receiving feedback that she had not demonstrated enough confidence in making independent decisions. It was a difficult lesson in how professional experience can be interpreted differently across workplaces, even when the underlying skills remain relevant.
A year later, Badmus feels more settled in the UK, although the adjustment continues. She still catches herself emphasising team achievements when she needs to explain her individual contribution.
The work of being visible
Throughout our conversation, Badmus returns repeatedly to the importance of visibility. It is a recurring theme in her career, one she credits with helping her secure many of the opportunities she has received.
When I ask how professionals can become more visible, her first recommendation is straightforward: do the work well.
“If you are not doing good work, you’ll be hesitant to talk about it,” she says.
For Badmus, visibility begins with substance rather than self-promotion. People need something meaningful to communicate before they can confidently communicate it. Strong work provides the foundation, and visibility helps ensure that the work reaches people who might otherwise never discover it.
Once that foundation is in place, she encourages professionals to find ways of sharing their expertise that feel natural to them. Some people communicate best through writing, while others are more comfortable creating videos.
The format, she argues, matters less than the value of what a person shares. The objective is to make their knowledge and capabilities visible to the people who might benefit from them.
She also does not believe visibility should be confined to social media. Being recognised within an organisation or professional community can be equally valuable. Visibility, in this sense, would mean making one’s contributions easier for others to recognise and remember.
That does not necessarily require leading a major project or speaking at every meeting. She points to something as simple as volunteering to document meetings and capture important project discussions.
Such responsibilities can help colleagues recognise a person’s reliability, attention to detail, and understanding of the work being done.
Adapting to a different workplace
Badmus’s transition from Nigeria to the UK has also reshaped her understanding of professional relationships. Having worked in both countries, she believes Nigerians moving to Britain may need to become more comfortable with small talk, even among people they barely know.
“In Nigeria, we have relationships with our colleagues. Some of my best friends today started as colleagues, but we tend to want to nurture and build the relationship to the point where we can then share certain things, but over here, we’re jumping in to the deep end.”
She also believes Nigerian professionals need to become more direct about what they want. Being good at a job does not automatically mean that employers will recognise every contribution or offer the next opportunity without being asked.
Sometimes, professionals must articulate their expectations rather than assume their work will speak entirely for itself.
Her career has taken her from acting sets to dance classrooms, from a Nigerian edtech company to the British workplace.
None of these transitions followed a straightforward plan, and several required her to reconsider what success might look like. Yet a pattern runs through them: opportunities often emerged when she stepped forward, made her abilities apparent, and remained willing to learn.
Survival may have been the thread connecting her different careers, but visibility has helped her move between them.