As far as I'm aware it was an employer who sent him to college so he would have been working at the same time as attending.

Leaving school at 15 and being dyslexic didn't do Richard Branson much harm in the long term.

I never commented on that. Simply that the Apprentice contestants are not exceptional by any stretch of the imagination. And the gamey little tasks they had "to manage" were not exactly challenging.

Look at the ridicuous things they all did and said. Its a pantomime.

Lucinda left the house after the tenth task in October 2007. When did the first task begin?

And that's why it gets such high viewing figures and is on prime time BBC1. If it was a group of exceptionally good young potential business people doing real business tasks it would be an Open University programme on BBC2 at 4am.

They are there for approximately eight weeks.

Well they're certainly exceptional at something given their salaries. SAS isn't going to employ someone, giving them £100k on the basis of nothing.

Which is a shame.

Big Brother, Britain's got talent and Dancing on Ice are popular too. Doesn't mean the participants are clever.

Perhaps that's why I have worked with so many cretins in the bizworld - they are no-talent, lying cheating id*ots - whose only hope of a job is to tell lies.

Norty, norty!

You really think that?

You were genuinely impressed?

I don't know why people think selling requires any intelligence--it's more a sort of relentless personality than intelligence that's necessary, I think. I was briefly involved in selling, and I was good at it, but I absolutely hated it on ethical grounds. I left for the sake of my soul.

Yes, I do really think that. I think Alex, Claire and Lee were all worthy winners. Lee won it for me based on his ability to come up with ideas. If I was SAS I would have employed him but it was a tough decision imo.

The tasks are carefully picked so that they highlight certain areas that SAS is looking for while at the same time make good tv. I'm not going to say the tasks were easy because under those circumstances - minimal time and being filmed(!) - I don't think they were. I've done a lot of group work at uni and it's actually pretty difficult, while to outsiders it just looks like.. "why aren't they just getting on with it!?".

Why do they need to be clever? The clever people go on university challenge or something.

The Apprentice Candidates need to be clever because they will get paid a fairly high salary to manage people within a corporate environment in pursuit of business success.

Yet they can't even price laundry or label fish.

Maybe you should go on and show SAS what a real apprentice is like then?

I don't think being "clever" is a prerequisite for being a successful business man or woman, at least not in the traditional sense. All of them were already on (very) high salaries and in very successful jobs. So like I said before - I wish I was as thick as them.

As an employer, if I discovered a 'stupid irrelevant lie' on a potential recruit's CV it would cast doubt over everything else on it, including the important bits.

I'd also be concerned about them continuing to lie to me once employed. I'd want employees I felt I could trust and that were capable of using a spell checker.

I'm not arguing against that. I don't think SAS just went "oh, who cares?". I'm sure every single thing on his CV was checked and verified.

SAS has been in the business for long enough to tell when people are just never to be trusted and when people have told a lie on their CV out of insecurity about education level. He's not the type of guy you can easily fool as far as I can see.

The fact that SAS was still interested in Lee despite his lie and poor spelling (the spelling worries me more than the lie tbh) shows that he saw a really strong candidate in Lee from his successful career so far.

Lee spelled 'tomorrow' as 'tommorrow'. There were other mistakes like that - phonetic mistakes. That's not dyslexic, that's illiterate.

They claim very high salaries but then get exposed later.

And Alex, for example, is on £24k. Hardly a high salary.

I urge you to have higher aspirations than the muppets on The Apprentice.

My take on it is this:

If Lee had said that he had a particular qualification which was required in order for him to get the job, then he should have been fired as soon as the lie was exposed, as he would have been trying to obtain a pecuniary advantage by deception. However, his 'lie' (and there is some dispute about whether or not it was a lie, as he had apparently put on his CV that he did not complete the course) was not relevant to the job he was after.

I am NOT condoning lying on a CV, and it's something I have never done - not even in the hobbies and interests section! - but Lee's motivation for what he wrote was clearly not to defraud or gain an unfair advantage.

Not a sackable offence as far as I'm concerned.

Most people would embelish interests or play up their experience or emphasise the bits they thought the job was looking for. its an all together different thing though to claim to have an education you don't have. It reveals an educational problem that needs hiding and asks the questions why he dropped out and why he hasn't made up for the lack of education since. As you say it also raises the doubt that any other problems will be lied about and what appears in future from him oin writing may be just as fictitious.

Doesn't it depend on the intelligence of the person being sold to? I would think used car salesman as soon as I heard Lee open his mouth and adopt questioning miser mode in seconds. I put telesales calls into my pocket talking to themselves till they give up but obviously someone buys their lines.

There's also something about matching apprentices to market in SAS's calculations. The Indians would have been terified if Ruth had turned up to persuade them to take SAS's old computers. Michelle had done similar work before and was less threatening. The stockbroker belt got Simon to do his property business on golf courses with them. Transport for London have got Lee as a super Dixons salesman trying to flog them big TV screens - you can hardly see Lucinda or Raef down in the entrails of tube stations with tube managers who came up from the ticket offfice.

as he wasn't applying for a catering position a lot of interviewers wouldn't have even bothered looking at his education that closely as he is 30 and would have done his catering course about 12 years ago so it is no longer relevant - I can't remember the last time I got asked about education or exam results - these day it take's up one line on my CV and I don't even bother mention what school I attended - in fact if I decided to change jobs my new employers who have difficulty getting references from anyone but by current employers as my previous company has closed down & the one before that was so long ago they've probably destroyed the records that I was even employed there

SAS is one of the best business men in the world. If one of the leading figures in my field were to regard me in the way SAS does of Alex, Claire or Lee then I'd be very happy indeed. I don't think that kind of aspiration is bad at all. I mean, how much higher should I aim?

They all seem to work extremely hard and seem to enjoy what they do. When you couple that with the fact that some of them left school with qualifications no higher than GCSEs and could've ended up working for minimum wage for the rest of their lives I actually have a lot of respect for them for how far they've got in their careers at a pretty young age.

So you and everyone you know are proven liars, good for you.