After a 40-year career as one of Wall Street’s most influential dealmakers, Jennifer Nason knows a thing or 2 about how to position yourself in the workplace.
Jennifer has served as Global Chair of Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan, advised on landmark mergers and acquisitions and holds board positions with public, private and non-profit organisations including Rio Tinto, Accenture, the American Australian Association and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. This didn’t happen overnight. Jennifer built her tower brick by brick from the ground up, with the proper foundations to weather any storm.
Before she returns home to Australia to deliver the 2026 Rodney Wylie Lectures, these are her tips for demonstrating your value, challenging the status quo and leveraging your unique perspective to become the most valuable employee in any room.
Register for Sydney and Melbourne Rodney Wylie Lecture, or join the waitlist for Brisbane.
The absurdity is the hype-competition, where those who may well perform good but use the good for an instrument of narrow profit agendas, advanced in a university-based career, over those who do good for the sake of good. Their roles as humanists, scientists, and organisers, is their ethical identity. They do it because it is who each is. Not for profit.
You need to start looking at yourself in the mirror. Do you have any compassion or have a conscience attune to the welfare of humanity? Maybe you do, but we all need to hear it, and see it acted.
From the editor of The Times Higher Education Supplement, 31 July 2026:
| As regular readers will know, it is far from unusual for us to lead a newsletter with a story about student employability. As the job market for entry-level jobs is further squeezed by the rise of AI, and as students and their families increasingly come to question the value of degrees, a greater focus than ever on graduate outcomes seems inevitable. This week’s lead focuses on the question of whether all degrees should include an element of work experience, on the back of an announcement to this effect by the University of Manchester. What is much more unusual is to see, in a single newsletter, not one but two stories about the importance of philosophy to employability. And it is almost inconceivable that both those pieces would have a focus on Asia, the continent that is commonly perceived to have the strongest focus on STEM degrees. Yet we learn that courses combining AI and philosophy are surging in popularity in China, Hong Kong and the Philippines, driven by the demand from employers for “graduates who can understand and use generative technologies as well as critically evaluate them”. Meanwhile, in an opinion piece, Manu Kapur, professor of learning sciences and higher education at ETH Zurich and, notably, director of the Singapore-ETH Centre in Singapore, writes that alongside mathematics, philosophy is a key part of the intellectual “shared grammar” that all graduates will need in an AI-driven future in order not only to ask AI good questions but to judge its answers. That is, “employers will need those who can reason – not only with AI but, more importantly, against it”, Kapur believes. And all this comes close in the wake of another piece by a philosopher at the University of Dundee making a similar point – and emphasising that even the tech industry itself is realising the value of philosophers, with the head of the personality alignment team at Anthropic, Amanda Askell, being a Dundee philosophy graduate. That piece was written in response to Dundee’s proposal to close its stand-alone philosophy programme. And, as the piece notes, Dundee is far from the only UK university to cut back its philosophy provision amid the wave of humanities redundancies in recent years. Of course, it’s complicated. Amid a growing perception in the West, too, that STEM degrees are a better bet for employability, universities attest that enrolment in philosophy programmes is declining. And it will probably take considerably more than a few high-profile tech hires of philosophy graduates to alter that perception. Even Kapur is not necessarily arguing that more people should major in philosophy – as opposed to studying it as part of a common core programme. But as the development of AI and robotics proceeds at breakneck pace, it remains very unclear which traditional graduate employment sectors will retain the strongest demand for carbon-based employees. In such circumstances, a degree that teaches deep, patient, ethical thinking and close attention to meaning and detail would seem at the very least a useful vehicle for students to hedge their career bets. Moreover, if such skills ultimately prove obsolete, it shouldn’t take a philosopher to wonder about what that entails for carbon-based employees as a whole. |
Neville Buch
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