The Bray perspective - Teach your children well

What's good enough for SAP, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and 3Com is good enough for Bray Enterprises. So we are pleased to announce our latest philanthropic gesture - the Bray Reinvestment In Business Education programme, or BRIBE.

Industry is desperate for graduates, but not sufficiently desperate to spend anything on training them. Graduates are desperate to get into industry, but not so desperate as to pay for their own training.

Universities are desperate to replace the ICL mainframes they have used to teach computing since 1965, but they can't afford to. And Bray Enterprises is desperate for industry to buy our products.

BRIBE solves all these problems at a stroke. We have developed a qualification called the BCBC (which stands for Bray Certificate of Business Competence, not Beggars Can't Be Choosers), which proves that the holder is an expert in our products. BCBC course materials will be sold at knockdown rates to universities and colleges, each of which will also be given #20,000-worth of Bray products on which to teach them.

In order to ensure the course is completely fair to our competitors, it will be split into two modules.

A two-week foundation module will cover issues such as acoustic couplers and floppy disks. Then students will take a two-year professional module requiring extensive hands-on experience, which is where the 20 grand's worth of Bray kit will come in handy.

To qualify to teach the BCBC course, all a university needs is an empty shed in which to install our equipment, and some flexible moral principles.

We only make a few small stipulations. The university must teach the whole course, using only the textbooks and web site supplied by us (at very reasonable rates). This workload must form at least 80% of the total degree.

The university is allowed to set its own final exams, but graduates who pass their BCBC cannot fail their degree.

The BCBC course must not be taught in less than two years, so as not to compete with our commercial training partners, who charge five grand for teaching the same material over a long weekend. Using teaching material from other IT companies is forbidden.

Finally, the university must display our logo on all stationery, buildings and official documents, and must be renamed to include the words 'Bray' and 'eternally grateful'.

The course is designed to produce what we call 'market ready' graduates, so we have consulted extensively with industry over the content of the course.

There is, therefore, less emphasis on hardware architectures and the principles of database design, and more on philosophical and statistical issues, including a module on why it is better to work longer hours for less money.

Students love the idea of a qualification which will be an instant passport to a job, with no personal training costs, and where the exams are so easy that you can pass them even with the mother of all hangovers. To help the cash-strapped, we have developed a sandwich course, which will allow students to work in a sandwich bar at night to earn the cost of their tuition.

Next year, BRIBE will be extended into schools, with the introduction of B-Levels and BCSEs. We're unlikely to be able to stump up #20,000 for every school, but we do have several old Amstrads to give away. By 2005, we predict that every 16-year-old will have a BCSE.

Of course, there will always be a few academic spoilsports who will argue that degree courses should be educational and not vocational; that they should focus on transferable skills such as communication, presentation and the ability to learn. We think this is perfectly reasonable, and have only one comment: buy your own kit!