AN INTERNATIONAL businessman has enlisted help to run a sales course like the one that helped him turn his life around.

Now Stuart Wischhusen, along with his partners in the scheme, are looking for businesses who would give a young person work experience and the chance of an interview.

Mr Wischhusen told the Echo last year how he had been unemployed and drifting when he took a sales course run by Wessex Training in 1988, at the age of 19. His Hurn-based company, BPak360, has seen profits grow 6,000-fold, taking him to California for several months recently.

Now he has been joined by Poole company Best Training to get his project off the ground.

Mr Wischhusen said the partnership had been a good fit. “It’s something they’ve been looking for, for a long time,” he said.

“They also work with a lot of young unemployed people and they wanted something that would offer something different to give them a new career path.”

He and Best Training have brought in a sales trainer to organise the course. They now need businesses who would offer up to eight weeks of work experience, followed by the chance of an interview.

“Now we want to find businesses who will come forward and say they will at least interview the sales graduates so they could potentially employ them,” he said.

“The government pay for everything for an eight-week period. After that, they could choose to give them full time employment and a trainee sales position or a traineeship.”

Ricci Colla, employment and staffing solutions adviser, said: “Our focus is predominantly on helping people, giving them the chance, giving them the training to get to where they want to be – working with people that are out of work or long-term unemployed and need the chance to progress.

“The reason we went through traineeship route is because it’s easier to secure funding through that route than any other. There’s no one really focussing on the sales industry and the professional industries. The potential scope for it is quite huge.”

Companies interested in offering work experience to should email tom.lund@best2train.co.uk