Gap year training is sign of the times

While these dangers are not often encountered in investment banks themselves, they have plenty of relevance to the increasing numbers of students who are planning gap years until the job market picks up.

A course in the UK now allows gappers to benefit from the same kind of advice and training that is more usually given to bankers, businessmen and journalists heading off to far-flung places.

'People going on a traditional gap year are choosing locations that are less and less mainstream,' says Nick Edmunds, a director of Objective, a personal security firm that runs the course.

'One of the most popular destinations is South America and in Mexico and Columbia you have two of the places with the highest kidnap threat.'

The firm's ex-military management aims to help gap-year travellers help themselves if they get into trouble on their exotic travels.

Edmunds is adamant that the firm does not set out to frighten the adventurous traveller, who may be spending their first prolonged spell away from the support of friends and family.

The idea is to give them the knowledge and confidence to deal with problems as they arise. Edmunds concedes that much of the one-day course could be gleaned from a thorough scouring of the web and a travel book shop, but says the seasoned experience of the course trainers is invaluable.

'What they would miss is the experiential stuff: how one of our team avoided a cocaine sting in Columbia; how another handled a hold-up on a bus, where the person sat behind her was shot..'

The course aims to be as relevant as possible by including recent gap-year travellers among the trainers. They serve as a useful reminder that a gap-year should be an enjoyable experience and not one paralysed by anxiety.

After all, the most serious danger that most travellers face is likely to be amoebic dysentery, rather than be an AK47- toting bandit frog-marching them to a cash point.

'Most travellers get into trouble because they get ill,' says Edmunds. 'We look at the first aid issue and we talk about how to keep fit.'

And if they stay fit, then that job in investment banking remains a possibility, as long as the markets eventually recover.