Lord Alan Sugar, star of the BBC Show the Apprentice, wants to see apprentices of real life, and all the other workers elsewhere, in the workplace.
“They have to put their tramps in the office,” he told the BBC.
The businessman who has become a personality on TV, was launched in the debate that has continued since work at home increased in popularity after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lord Sugar, known for his clearly skeptical tone, also described Brexit as “the greatest disaster in his life”.
“It is now (that) the complete ramifications of us not being part of the European Union are starting to really wreak havoc,” he said. He thinks that joining it could help the United Kingdom get out of its current problems.
“If I was Prime Minister, I would come to my folded knees and asked to come back,” he said.
Lord Sugar, addressing BBC Breakfast to mark the launch of the apprentice series 19, also said that he considered the use of artificial intelligence (IA) as “a little cheating”.
He said that the show was trying to choose tasks that follow modern technology, despite competitors who do not have access to the Internet or their mobile phones.
But while in the real world, AI is increasingly used by candidates and recruiters, it does not approve.
“If you are going to use it to write your CV and yourself, then it’s bad, right?”
As for home work, he would make an exception for software editors who “get up at three in the morning with a kind of brainstorming” and for physically disabled.
But everyone must start to mix with their colleagues more, he maintains, in particular apprentices.
The problem is that many young people “just want to sit at home,” he said.
“I am a big defender to bring them back to work, because the only way an apprentice will learn, is from his colleagues.
“These are little things, like interaction with your more mature colleagues, which will tell you how to do this, how to do that.
“It lacks in this work of zoom culture.”
The comments of Lord Sugar intervened after Lord Stuart Rose, former president of Marks and Spencer, said earlier this month that home work was “not a good job”.
Lord Sugar was himself in business himself from an early age. At 12, he got up before school to boil the beets for a local Greengrocker.
He made his first million to sell some of the first personal computers. He founded, then launched his business, Amstrad, before going to other commercial companies, before embarking on show business.
He has a personal wealth estimated at more than 1 billion pounds sterling.
Despite its frank and large -scale views, the parallels with another (former) apprentice presenter are limited. He has no political ambitions.
“I have no intention of presenting myself to be the Prime Minister, because it is an untenable and ungrateful work,” he said.
