Workshop A - Session 3

Title: Employability and Competitiveness - Working with SMEs Chair: Tom Cannon, Management Charter Initiative, UK Dr Ali Golamazad, University of Bremen, Germany

I am going to present you with some short points about the things that really happen in small and medium-sized companies facing changes in the market and the new technologies, innovative computer-integrated processes in manufacturing in different areas, and also innovations in the area of quality assurance systems, environment and management systems, and a new work organisation.

The difficulty is that this kind of innovation has been introduced mainly by the big industries who also have had also the opportunity to train the workforce. This produced an inequality between the workforce in these areas and the small and medium-sized companies, in that the people have not had the opportunity to acquire the competencies of the market. So 'innovation needs and innovative structure' are possible in the small and medium-sized companies - and if you say small and medium-sized you have to mean mostly small companies, companies which are made up of 2, 5 or 6 people.

We have huge amounts of innovation. The big companies are increasing. But we lose a lot of small and medium-sized companies, not because they do not want to operate effectively, but because they are not able to do so. Why? In a European LEONARDO Project, we are trying to assess the self contribution of the workforce in the work during the innovation-innovative process.

Three Areas

We have tried to assist this kind of work, dealing with these 3 areas: quality assurances system, environmental and work organisation systems.

You will see that to be able to work in this market, challenging with a lot of other companies who are involved in developing technology, the small and medium-sized companies need training. So we come now to the matter I am going to talk about - in-house trainers. We talk about lean production in terms of high quality cost and time, but the reality is that in the small and medium-sized companies, both these factors come down to the paid workforce.

If you say they need a new kind of qualification, it means in the process that the companies have to maintain high quality, related to less time, low cost. It means the effective use of resources, human resources. How is it possible to send them away and train for the new challenges to the companies? It is always a problem. Someone asked, why the small and medium-sized companies are not so active in training their staff. It is not the problem that these companies do not know what would happen or that they are very wary about it. It is a problem of the human resources that they have.

What we are going to discuss is this kind of view. In reality the workforce has to do a lot of work which it is not really used to doing. To be involved in the whole organisation of the work, how can we set up training, how should it be organised? It is not the same kind of work in which the people have been instructed. They have to test step by step what they are doing; they are responsible for each part of their own work. So in this kind of work how can we support the enterprises, and the institutions and trainers, to serve the right concept to work and train? If the small and medium-sized enterprises are strong and focused, we have to try to design training concepts which let them use the same manpower as organised on training. Engineers are running from one course to another, to self-help, self-creation, and yet they learn the new competencies. It is not a problem for engineers not having enough knowledge of innovation.

The problem is in their own enterprises, how could they transfer this knowledge to the workforce, to train people as technicians or engineers who are responsible in the enterprise, who are a part of the daily production process that they are trained in. These are the main problems a training system must address.

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