Zoe Williams’ piece on today’s nepo job market is on the nose and tells me that nothing has changed in the past 40 years (Looking for a job? Who you know probably matters more than what you know, 15 July). It’s not much to do with artificial intelligence, and studying chemistry is not the solution.
Anecdotally, of the 13 engineering science graduates from Keble College, Oxford, in 1982, only three found work in the UK – in Daddy’s firm. The rest of us went overseas. My nephew recently graduated in chemical engineering from Durham and could get nothing better than a lab assistant job in the UK. So he’s joining a Norwegian oil firm in Stavanger, upstream research for the trading desk.
My eldest daughter, a paramedic graduate, seems destined for emergency response in the Australian mining industry. My youngest has dreams of studying medicine. But Daddy has just explained to her that it means working overseas on graduation, attempting to default on the £100,000 debt she’ll accumulate and never coming back. The reason this country is a declining parody of a developed nation is that kids are best served graduating from the Airport Bookstore School of Management and honing their bullshitting skills.
Managers with a visceral understanding of the business and the conviction to recruit, train and retain the right talent are rare. So it defaults to HR drones and their clickbait competency matrices.
Peter Anderson
Barwick-in-Elmet, West Yorkshire
