Every year is the same. Come July, a frenzy ensues to secure funding for whatever training course can be thinly veiled as being aligned to meeting the requirements of the business. Everybody in the office suddenly has a desire to jump on the training course bandwagon and whip out their begging bowl for course fees to be paid for by the company.

I’ve been inundated with offers. First in the queue was an eager office junior with dreams to be a master in business administration.

I admit I felt her request was a little premature at this stage of her career. However, I chose to support her.

In the good old days, I would have authorised this myself straight away. But nowadays, the process is a bureaucratic quagmire of hoops to jump through.

The first port of call was the HR manager. It was a breeze considering the l

It still amazes me, all those people that don’t work in the City who presume that everyone who does is a millionaire. There are loads of millionaires in the City, but there are even more that wished they were. And therein lies the problem – the “millionaire wannabes” who, in my experience, tend to be young, twentysomething Essex boys (the posh part, of course).

Just the other day I ventured out to meet a client for lunch, taking with me a junior member of my team. The minute we stepped over the threshold of the £100-per-head restaurant, Junior Boy seized the moment to reincarnate himself into an embarrassing parody of what he thinks constitutes impressive trader behaviour.

Junior Boy swaggered up to the cocktail bar with such force that his ridiculous bird’s nest hairdo flapped so much I could smell the hair