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.
