Meet Selorm Adadevoh, a Ghanaian business executive who currently leads the commercial department of MTN Group, Africa’s largest telecommunications network. He previously served as the Chief Executive Officer of MTN Ghana.
He will start his new job in Johannesburg and will be in charge of the group’s commercial strategy and operations. In his new position, he will assume all of Jens Schulte-Bockum’s executive responsibilities.
Adadevoh joined MTN as CEO of MTN Ghana in 2018. Prior to that, he worked for Caribbean mobile network operator Digicel, as well as Millicom in Africa, before moving on to positions in the United States, United Kingdom, and Latin America.
Adadevoh once applied for a job as a cleaner in the United Kingdom, but he was turned down. He landed a job after 400 job interviews after being unemployed for four months. He accepted an offer from Electrolux in the United Kingdom and went on to develop a career as a telecom and financial services company leader with 22 years of expertise in strategy, general management, and technology management.
He worked as a consultant for over ten years, advising C-level executives at firms such as Vodafone, Hutchison 3G, FTSE 100, Procter & Gamble, United Airlines, Pfizer, and others. This enabled him to gain experience in a variety of businesses.
Adadevoh, a graduate of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), began his career in the business sector while he was at level 300. For an internship, he would write letters to corporations in the United Kingdom and civil engineering schools in the United States. Taylor Woodrow, Europe’s largest engineering conglomerate, accepted one of the fifteen letters he sent out for internships.
“And for two months in the UK, all I did was printing and binding, I learned nothing about computers until I came back to Ghana,” he said at Springboard 2019 Global Convocation.
“However, when I came back to school, I applied back to them for a full-time job, and I was offered a full-time job, so I went back to Taylor Woodrow after KNUST.”
But he quit his job at Taylor Woodrow because he realized that he knew nothing about the job. “I didn’t know anything on the field of engineering except what I learned on paper at KNUST. After three weeks of being grossly frustrated and embarrassed, I quit,” he said.
“Being a civil engineer was all well and good, but all industries are going to need people who understand technology, so I decided to learn IT from books.”
In his spare time, the celebrated CEO plays tennis.