Sandwich course in management

One of the consequences of the present depressed economic and labour market situation is the lessening of industrial support for programmes of higher education and training. Universities and colleges are finding it increasingly difficult to find meaningful developmental industrial attachments for their students, whilst firms' training budgets seem less readily extended to schemes of sponsorship of trainees on university or college courses. Investment in human resources is always an easy target for the rubber bullets of the cost‐cutters, especially if that investment is in full‐time trainees, who may well leave, whose pay‐off is long term and incapable of precise, or even approximate, financial evaluation. Because such cutbacks appear too often to be expedient rather than rational decisions, we wish to make a contribution to the debate by sharing with a wider audience our experience of five years of collaboration in the training and job placement of business trainees in Schweppes Limited and at Ealing Technical College (an outline of the Ealing course is contained in Box 1; Schweppes' original reasons for sponsoring trainees are briefly presented in Box 2). This article describes the training and development of the four six‐month industrial periods in the four‐year CNAA honours degree course — which purported to be an intensive, high quality programme of accelerated development for each member. We think that the process has been successful, but will leave readers to assess whether the current decisions on their own company's training budget might be influenced by the information presented here.