A year ago, Brendan Donnellan was a student of Latin and Greek in the UK and had begun to seriously question his immediate academic future. He was dissatisfied with how much time the program demanded of him, as well as the practical options he saw himself facing after finishing his schooling.

"I was trying to find any way not go to back to a three-year dusty old college with professors who cough at you," Donnellan says. He then found an advertisement for Prague College, an institution offering one, two, and three-year business programs, and signed himself up.

He's now finishing a one-year professional diploma in business and has a job with a Prague public relations firm that sprung from a Prague College internship.

The school opened its doors in 2003 with the goal of catering to students like Donnellan, presenting itself as a unique source of progressive, flexible and marketplace-oriented education. This fall, the college is adding another option for students looking to circumvent traditional three- or five-year programs: The opportunity for students to work for a Higher National Diploma (HND), a two-year program that's the equivalent of the first two years of bachelor degree programs offered at British universities but which qualifies students to work professionally.

The introduction of the HND, says Doug Hajek, the Canadian founder of Prague College, continues the work of the college to continually meet the needs of students and the business community. "[The] HND is one of the most flexible programs pretty much anywhere in the world," Hajek says.

The program's strength is that it offers both vocational training and a basis for further theoretical study, says Jeff Buehler, Prague College's academic coordinator and program developer. "It is two years of a British B.A. [bachelor's degree], but it's also complete training vocationally. You're fully qualified to go get a job and there's everything you need to go into a studio. On the other hand, it provides the grounding to get a B.A."

Buehler says that as an adviser to students, he thinks the two-step approach to a bachelor's degree offered by the HND will be encouraging for men and women who had not previously considered continuing their higher education.

"People who come in just wanting practical training, which the degree does very well, will say after two years, 'Oh, I can get a B.A., it's not so far away,'" Buehler says.

The HND is new in the Czech Republic but a well-established program in Britain. Hajek says he chose the British degree because he wanted to bring an internationally recognized two-year diploma to the school, and the two-year HND degree applies toward all European bachelor's degree programs. The Czech Republic's entry into the European Union also made a British program a sensible choice.

The HND is not the only new offering at the school. The college, which already offers a business diploma, will continue to offer the HND in that field but is adding programs in computing, interactive media and graphic design.

The computing program approaches information technology from a practical standpoint, says Hajek. "Our business program stresses information technology, how it can help a business and how to work with programmers to develop databases. Our computing program is coming at it from the other angle and teaches students how to actually develop programs and build databases, but shows them how to do it in a way which will help businesses."

This emphasis on practicality extends to the graphic design program as well. The school worked with Dept. of Design (DOD), a Prague-based design firm that's been helped shape the look and feel of dozens of local cultural events and companies — including Prague College itself. DOD partners Simon Gray and Tom Kostelac will help to teach the design courses. Gray says his experience in the firm, both in working with clients and hiring new employees, helped him to shape the new courses.

"When we were hiring new workers, there was just a huge gap in skills. First of all, other design programs accept so few students per year that from our pool of applicants for a job, maybe 2 percent have some previous education. It's a pain to teach them everything," Gray says. "Also, our studio is very much a corporate studio. We want to have the freedom of creativity they experience in university but also show the boundaries, not leave them treading water without the skills they need."

Hajek says the focus of the design program is mostly on the creation of books, brochures, posters and flyers, rather than more esoteric artistic pursuits like typography and the creation of fonts taught by other design schools. Students will also capitalize on the resources of the school's strategic corporate partners to work on real-world projects.

"We are working with a whole range of companies to show students what is needed in the real business. For example, one of our partners is a very large travel agency for Scandinavian travel to Prague. They have travel buses and also operate a few hotels. They can say to us, 'We need a new flyer for the hotel,' and that can become the basis of a practical design project for a class."

The school's large stable of corporate partners also contributes to the interactive media program, says Hajek.

"Our first priority is in teaching for employability, and criteria No. 2 is best using our resources. We wanted to offer professional sound production, and one of our strategic partners is Akropolis Radio, which has the facilities and the resources," Hajek says. "Now we can offer that to our interactive media students."