New York ? The olive was already rolling around on Dan Hoffman’s tongue before he realized he’d been lured into a boobytrap set amid the mixed greens.

So Hoffman quickly devised an emergency plan to escape embarrassment: He swallowed the pit.

Innovative, certainly, if not exactly orthodox business behavior. But then, that’s why Hoffman’s Manhattan law firm, Proskauer Rose LLP, had asked him and about 70 other summer hires to report to the executive conference room. Today, they were assigned to etiquette bootcamp.

“Believe me, many people have been stuck on the ladder of success because somebody said, ‘Did you see his table manners?'” etiquette instructor Ann Marie Sabath counseled, as she paced Oprah-like between the rows of tables. “Now that won’t happen to you.”

More employers and educators are emphasizing that message or variations on it, by training young workers in the rituals of cutlery and napkin usage, exchanging business cards, making small talk, even how to confront an olive.

The training, etiquette experts and employers say, addresses a deficit of decorum among many young office workers, highlighted in a business environment where the line between casual and crude is increasingly blurred and constantly shifting.

Graduates need training

It’s amazing, for the most part, that these people don’t know how to cut their meat, or what to do with a fork or a toothpick,” said Maria Everding, a St. Louis-based etiquette consultant who conducts training for employers and on college campuses.

That may sound obvious until you hear Everding’s tales of the attorney who scratched his head with his fork, or the numerous students she has observed licking their fingers during training meals.

Even so, after an economic boom that saw many college graduates in high-tech and other fast-growing sectors winning lucrative job offers almost in spite of the way they dressed, the focus on etiquette can be unsettling.

Employers, though, say they value the training because changing professional dynamics have created a potential minefield of missteps. They cite everything from the increased dependence on e-mail and the omnipresence of cell phones to shifts in gender roles as reasons to re-emphasize the basics.

“It’s not really how to be a lawyer, but how to be a professional,” said Anita Zigman, in charge of training for Proskauer Rose, a firm specializing in corporate law.

As taught by Sabath on this particular day, being a professional begins with correctly holding a fork, progresses to the five key rules for using a napkin and graduates to tutelage in how to handle difficult-to-eat foods.

As for olive pits, she advised, the remainder of any food that goes into the mouth with a utensil should come out with a utensil, and be laid on the edge of the plate. Olives served as an antipasto can be eaten by hand, and taken out by hand. But better yet, she said, avoid the embarrassment and leave the olive uneaten.