But would you sell your granny down the river?
Financial
exams used to concentrate on an understanding of business, economics and the law but new entrants will now be asked to pass an ethics test.
About time
too some might shout. And with the newspapers still full to the brim with stories of greed, misselling and rate tinkering it’s probably not a surprising reaction.
If there was ever a case of the stable door being shut after the horse has bolted this is surely it. Not only has it bolted it has been saddled up, paraded in the ring and gone on to win the Grand National before anyone has noticed.
Odds on to win
As widely reported in the press,
the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment (CISI) is introducing online tests to gauge how potential City candidates might deal with moral dilemmas in the workplace. Unfortunately what they have failed to understand is that anyone who can read will
have seen the answers already.
If the exercise is aimed at stopping the would be Gordon Gekko’s plying their trade then it is of no more use than all
of those diversity tests are at keeping the bigots at bay. Regardless of your personal opinions or aims, if you’ve read the newspapers over the last few years you will know exactly what issues irk the population, what is considered politically incorrect
and what is likely to get you into the hall of shame should it ever come out. In this respect, those sitting the tests merely need to know what they are expected to say rather than what they actually think.
Tell me about your childhood
To get to the bottom of how somebody really thinks probably
needs to involve some Freudian questions and a leather couch rather than a multiple choice selection with the correct answer staring you in the face.
It’s
all a bit like asking a cat burglar up for parole what he’d do if he was walking through Mayfair and noticed the window of a large mansion was open. If the choice was to walk on by, climb through and steal valuables or call the police and stand guard
until they arrived, only the dumbest would be heading back to their cell.
With this in mind it’s not hard to imagine that with access to the daily papers
and the internet, even Adolf Hitler could have passed a diversity test with flying colours.