There was a time, several decades ago, when joining a big company generally meant a job for life. It also provided practical training, management progression and the ability to move across a variety of departments and disciplines and the opportunity to build up a comprehensive set of skills.
This was certainly the case when Nick Hyde joined ICI after graduating with a degree in engineering from Cambridge. ‘In the late 70s and early 80s, if you joined the ICIs of this world it was more or less a job for life. It had a great training programme: I went to one of the world’s leading graduate business schools, INSEAD, in France twice on marketing and business strategy events; I had internal ICI training of all kinds; I worked in the north-east, the north-west, Scotland and the US.’
The move from engineering into pharmaceuticals began in the early 1980s when the recession drove ICI to start combining production and engineering roles. As ICI became AstraZeneca (AZ) he moved more into fine chemicals and from fine chemicals into pharmaceutical intermediates and from there into pharmaceuticals: ‘At various times we made small molecules, we made peptides, we had the largest oligo unit in the world, and I was responsible for some biologics manufacturing too.’
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