BEWARE of notices offering enlightenment in the workplace as they are not always as they appear as The Margin discovered recently.

A division of a large Fortune 500 company issued a memo to staff offering a foreign language course during the workday to help improve their global competitiveness".

Six months later, all those who had availed of the offer were sacked. The reason? Management reckoned that anyone who had enough time to do a course during business hours was clearly underemployed.