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IN THE AUTUMN OF EVERY YEAR, THOUSANDS OF UNIVERSITY graduates are transplanted from the world of education into the world of industry. This is a seasonal event, marking the end of a process which begins nine months beforehand. The employers advertise, woo, test, sift and select. The candidates taste, evaluate, and finally accept or reject the various offers. The ritual dance is over.

The widespread recognition that the UK is very short of skilled manpower, particularly in the information technology field calls for urgent measures. The article outlines a practical scheme for developing and upgrading young people in the middle ability band — the people who have been overlooked in the last few years.

When one talks to groups of apprentices, or trainees — or indeed to any group of youngsters in industry — no matter from which firm — and it applies to both the graduates at one end of the scale and the sixteen‐year‐olds at the other — one finds a depressing situation, particularly if the young men are off their guard and speaking honestly. They are, in the main, soldiering through their training period, putting up with a lot of boredom, enduring college periods which frequently seem to have little meaning more than the route to an essential academic hurdle, and feeling in general that the firm hasn't much interest in them, nor they in the firm. The training manager, probably one of the few people who does want to take a proper interest, is looking after far too many lads to cope, and is bogged down keeping the mountain of records required to run the system and satisfy the training board. One finds that the apprentice association has degenerated into a struggling body of dedicated committee members who try to whip up enough enthusiasm to run the odd dance or sporting event — largely ignored by the top managers. Can we not turn this association of young men into something which helps them to help themselves, and which helps the firm at the same time?

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

DTAG is a consortium of long‐established providers — Brathay Hall Trust, Endeavour Training, Lindley Educational Trust, Outward Bound and the YMCA — loosely associated with Project Trident, the National Association of Outdoor Education and formerly with the Industrial Society. Contact can be made through Bertie Everard at 2 Fern Grove, Welwyn Garden City, Herts AL8 7ND.

Much is heard these days about the vital need to bring education (particularly in the schools) and industry more close together. Not least in this, the Prime Minister's call for a Great Debate on education and the Secretary of State's Green Paper or Consulative Document on education emphasise the vital need to bring the schools and industry more closely together. Of course the trouble with clarion calls to action on a national scale is that they tend to give the impression that nothing at all has been done in the particular field under scrutiny. It is a real danger that the intelligent man in the street is likely to gather from reportage of the regional conferences which the Secretary of State for Education & Science held after the Prime Minister's call that nothing has been, or is being, done about it.

‘No man teaches, he enables men to learn for themselves.’ Galileo Galilei (1564—1642) ‘To expose managers (on development courses) to new and challenging data and ideas and then make it impossible for them to make use of the new insights and even penalise them for doing so is highly frustrating. One can safely predict that managers so treated will have their performance adversely effected … ‘The entire organisation must consist of a multiple, overlapping group structure with every work group using group decision making processes, skilfully.’ Rensis Likert ‘No man is an island, entire of it self.’ John Donne (1571—1631)

▪ Have you, the training manager, ever wondered how good your training department really is? ▪ Have you sometimes thought you are misunderstood? ▪ Do you sometimes feel disembodied — floating free of firm links with your board of directors? ▪ Do you ever wonder what on earth you ought to be doing, or which way to turn? — If so, it is possible that a process we call ‘mutual monitoring’ will help you to get your bearings and provide a measure of support. We are using it in ICI, not primarily in response to the questions above, but because circumstances compelled us to think of some better way of managing the training function than simply budgets, establishments and levy/grants. We look on it as a way of forming a reasoned, agreed judgment about the effectiveness and health of the training function, in such a way that the benefit of doing so outweighs the cost.

Within the broad sweep of educational and training processes aimed at the development of people, there is a particular approach to which the label development training has come to be applied. Central to this approach is this cyclical process depicted below: