You won’t believe what happened this week. One of my analysts told me he wants to quit. At a time of soaring unemployment, this young bloke wants to give up a perfectly good job to go back to university to do a Masters (in something that sounds like Economics, but isn’t). I just don't get it.

I remember reading somewhere that business school applications tend to go up in a recession – either because people are out of a job, or because they see it as a good time to steer well clear of the front line. So it would have been less surprising if he’d decided to do this a year ago, when things were starting to get really hairy. But he claims he’s going now precisely because the economy appears to be picking up. To future employers, it’ll seem like he left after helping his employer through the worst, as opposed to getting out of the kitchen because he couldn’t stand the heat.

Ordinarily I’d be sympathetic to this argument. I know I would say this, but I do think your staff have a responsibility to knuckle down and help you through the worst. You’re keeping them in a job through the worst recession in a generation, so it’s only fair that they work their socks off until we’re out the other side. The problem is, we’re clearly not out the other side yet. I know the papers seem to be a bit more optimistic these days, and for reasons I can’t understand, people seem to be buying shares again. But for small firms like ours, the good times are still a long way off.

My other issue with his decision is that I just don’t see the point. He seems to think that once he’s got this additional qualification, he’ll be able to get a much better job paying twice as much money. But I’m not convinced. In a year’s time, I reckon I’m much more likely to hire someone who’s had experience of working through the downturn, as opposed to someone who’s spent the last year going to a few lectures and getting some extra letters after his name. It seems to me that you learn more from one year working in this kind of climate than you would in five years working in happier times – let alone a year spent in a classroom.

That’s not to say that I think doing extra study is a bad idea in itself. Personally, I’d love to go to business school one day, if only because it gives you a chance to meet some interesting people from different backgrounds, to spend some time thinking about how you do business, and to have a lot more lie-ins than I currently do. But I wouldn’t necessarily expect to get a better job as a result. And for the time being, I think the current school of hard knocks will teach me a lot more.