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Workshop A
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop A - Session 3 - Questions and Contributions
Tom Cannon: The three presentations have brought out a whole host of important issues, they have highlighted the scale of the small firm universe, accounting for a massive proportion of jobs in Europe. They have highlighted the traditional pattern of resistance to formal learning in small and medium-sized companies. They have indicated that many traditional methods of approach are not reaching small and medium-sized companies. Not only is that important because of their scale but small and medium-sized firms are being identified as being at the cutting edge of innovation and change, areas where Europe is losing ground, particularly to North America and Asia. Q: (Chris Boyes, QCA) Given that the major problem with small companies is using the same resources, same time and so on to train people, and the problems that have just been outlined, how did Alan Ward's company solve this? You brought in educationalists, and you used vocational qualifications. How did it work? Alan Ward: What we actually did were two things. We had to decide as a management team that we really wanted to do something with our culture, and we wanted to develop the workforce. We had to decide that someone had to have the job of being the internal champion, for want of a better word. It needed to be somebody fairly senior, so that they could obviously tackle the middle management. It also meant that, if it was a senior person then, in taking them away from the mainstream of activities, there would be more of a burden on the other senior managers. Then we had to look at where the expertise in learning was. Luckily we came to the conclusion that a previously untapped resource were local schools and colleges and their pupils. Starting off what I regard to be mutually beneficial projects, we learnt from the educationalists that the optimum pupil/teacher ratio was one to one and that 10 minutes gave you the maximum benefits. My organisation at that time regarded itself as a non smoking company. I have to say that people still smoked but not on the line. If people could go off line for a ten minute smoke, then we thought that we could do one-to-one ten minute sessions for learning. We were then told by the educationalists that if you wanted to plan the training in those 10 minute sessions, you ought to support those sessions with the use of either a company video or a discussion, a demonstration or some paperwork. I have to say, 6 years down the line, where we can we still do our internal training along those lines and we have seen significant increases in output per person, something like 21%. We do not miss anybody for 10 minutes, so it was the educationalists who told us how to do it and it works. Q: Given your enthusiasm, what got the breakthrough, what switched you into being a committed learning company? Alan Ward: Over the course of a few meetings, we all came to the conclusion as senior managers, that the one area that we had not looked at was people. It was the mindset really. You have got to have the belief in doing something and have the will from the top. If you look at the way we train our managers now it is absolutely not just technical training; they have got to have interpersonal skills. I think these days there are success stories out there. I think education is becoming much more receptive. When we were looking, we had to fight to get education establishments to work with us. Now they realise people do not stop learning when they walk in through the door of a manufacturing company. We can work together to bring out the best in people. Q: David, you have indicated that 65% of the TEC's client group are small and medium-sized enterprises. How do you reach them? David Compston: The big challenge now is to meet that huge number of companies. What we are talking about is a cultural change that we have got to bring about in society. What we need to do now is to try make sure that people in society believe that life is about learning all life long. That is the challenge that we are all facing. It means that we have got to organise things in a way in which people can take part in learning that is convenient to them, that they enjoy doing. We try and get the message across that learning is fun. People who find things out always find it exciting and fun. So we have got to get a culture change across in society. We have got to make sure that the learning establishments fit in with cultural change. Ali Golamazad: We do not have to concentrate on the companies only in the matter of innovation. They have to introduce a new system without the knowledge which is required to run it properly. This has to be developed. For example, one of the aspects of quality assurance is the working circles. A lot of companies are very happy provided they have laid down the specifications. The problem is to know whether the people who are working know what the management really expects the quality assurance system to do. We have done a lot of evaluations that showed that although there is a quality policy in the company, the contribution of the people is mainly centred on their own contribution without knowing the overall management intention. We have to focus the innovation on continual training in the companies and not only on the continual introduction of new technologies. To help maintain the quantity aspects of the work, there must be a direct relation between workforce and innovation. Tom Cannon: There does seem to be in North America, and to some degree in Asia, evidence that those business owners, those entrepreneurs, those small business proprietors with a degree who had graduated from higher education are much more likely to engage in lifelong learning than those who have not completed a higher qualification when they start a business. Germany, I think, has the highest average terminal education age amongst its entrepreneurial population, much higher for example than Britain. Do you find in Germany that smaller companies are more willing, particularly those owned and managed by graduates, to engage in dialogue or lifelong learning? Q. Eric Nixon, Denmark In Denmark most small companies are established by craftsmen, skilled workers and there are not very many established by higher education people or graduates from universities. There has been a wave during the last few years of establishing small companies by graduates from universities. These small enterprises are dealing with new technologies. The fact is the owners of these small enterprises do not seem to deal very much with lifelong learning at all, but the employed in small companies seem to deal with lifelong learning in their own way, although the frequency of attending education is increasing with the size of the companies. I always wonder why speaking about small enterprises is always about problems in small enterprises. Are small enterprises a problem or are they the enterprises with a new force? If they are, maybe we should look at them as sort of a source of lifelong learning and not like a problem for lifelong learning. Maybe lifelong learning could be the path and the key to make knowledge move from small enterprises to other enterprises. Tom Collins: The US President's reports to Congress pointed out that 60% of all market-shaping innovations in the last 25 years were introduced by small and medium-sized enterprises. So they are. But of course from a European point of view too many of those are being created in some senses by small and medium-sized enterprises from either across the Atlantic or across the Gobi desert. In Northern Italy particularly there is a tremendous dynamic developing the most successful small firm population in Europe. David Compston: In the UK here we have the Investors in People standard which has been very much focused on the larger and more medium-sized business. In Manchester, to appeal to the smaller businesses, we are re-branding the approach to Investors in People and calling it Building a Better Business. We think that is more appealing than saying investing in something because people feel they do not have the time for this when they are running a small business. You have to get the message across that you are actually providing a service which is very much focused at what is on their minds. Small businesses are always dealing with the present more than the long-term future, so you have to get the message across that you are in the support business, helping them for example to build a better business. You have to re-organise the approaches to the support services to fit the scale of the operation and we at Manchester TEC are very, very conscious of that. We are trying to make sure that our products match the needs of the customer and they are quite different for small businesses compared with the big corporations of course. Ali Golamazad: Germany's kind of educational system, which we call a dual system, means a lot of small and medium-sized companies are also responsible for training and educating the workforce. Q: Although I am not an Italian I work in Italy with an organisation which implements the big projects related to the small and medium-sized enterprises in North Italy. Basically, we start with the local organisation in Italy. Then the initiative is usually taken at regional level, where local initiatives are very strong. We work in association with employers and also with employment offices of different regions of Italy. Our work consists of initial analysis of a large number of enterprises with surveys and questions. From these, we try to identify the training needs of each enterprise, so reducing the scope to more realistic numbers. We started with 3,000 enterprises and finished with 75 enterprises, for instance, in our last project. On the basis of the review and examination and analysis of their answers we try to identify the training objectives. These we group in areas such as a need for marketing, knowhow or new technologies, human resource management, or simply a need for knowledge of the local legislation encouraging small businesses, and eventually training for trainers. We produce training materials and have trainers who are preparing a curriculum tailor-made to the needs of these small enterprises. In this way, we allow them exactly to resolve their own problems, which they identify. We help them by providing them with necessary training usually in the form of modules. These are also very strongly preferred in small-sized enterprises, where the labour force is quite limited and it is not available for long-term training and for long absence from the enterprises. At the same time we try to develop their ideas for internationalisation, innovation and local economic development, putting them in competition with and/or in collaboration with foreign companies. For example, they can contact partners who are interested in collaboration on joint ventures of marketing of products, giving them access also to foreign markets. So basically this is what we are doing. The results are quite impressive, having in mind that in many regions of North Italy up to 75% of the income is generated from small and medium-sized enterprises, not from big enterprises. I want also to advertise another aspect of the work done with small and medium-sized enterprises which is quite important. The labour market information system is a must if you really want to train people for the purposes and for the needs they have in this enterprise. This labour market information system is the responsibility of the local employment offices or employment authorities in countries or in the regions, or in the local offices. It is important to have the necessary information to match the skills, the number of people to be trained, responding to the needs of employers, not just to do this training for the sake of training. Tom Cannon: As we are coming towards the end of this session I always think it is a good idea to have some key points.
I think I would really just like to leave you with this thought. I sympathise with the Government and decision makers, because at the moment if you were an SME and you put your hand up for some help, it is almost death by a thousand initiatives. There are loads of things out there that can help. I would certainly like to see some reflection on the successes that are already out there and how they have become successful. I would like to see some of the main issues co-ordinated, so that help is very much focused on where business needs it most. David Compston: I really do believe that our universities have got to appreciate this in a much bigger way than they have done in the past. If you look at what is happening in the United States, you see a lot of new businesses coming out of the universities. There must be an awful lot of backup in helping those people to understand how businesses are run, so that once they have launched themselves with their good ideas, they are also supported in terms of running that business. Ali Golamazad: The question is how can the training institutes contribute to these processes of innovation? During the European projects we are also involved in we have tried to install working networks which deal with this question as it exists in companies in different European countries, Italy, Greece and others. I would like to make a suggestion for a long-term working group which deals with the idea, and to make a European proposal for helping the small and medium-sized companies to reach a European approach of innovation. Q: (Brian Tucker, Forum for Technology and Training) I have a concern that moving the responsibility of learning to individuals will give the smaller enterprises, not necessarily the medium ones, the excuse of doing even less than they are doing now. Q: (Peter Thomson, Training and Development Manager) Baroness Blackstone's question was how to get employers really engaged. Where are the employers? Fewer than 5% of the participants of this conference are from private sector employers. You might say, 'Maybe because they weren't invited.' I was speaking to one of the conference organisers last night. People from private sector organisations who declined to attend were many times more in proportion than those from other parts of our grouping - 50% of people working in SMEs, for example. We have a whole issue here about how to get the people who are not here involved. There are many ideas coming out, but I think what it comes down to is a very simple thing. If we are to try and speak to those organisations who are not currently involved and interested, we have got to speak in their language. We have got to give them down-to-earth, bottom line arguments. For instance, describing Investors in People in more practical terms - about employee development, not employee development for the beauty of it but because it makes the business better, more profitable. Q: (Tony Webb CBI UK) I suspect there is a huge amount of informal learning that takes place within SME which does not come out in the formal evaluation of what learning takes place, and is therefore missed. I am rather taken by Ralph Lindholm's list of the various forms of informal learning that the modern company is using in order to make an effective response to globalisation. Every one of those things was actually something which I think takes place in most SMEs whether they are world-beating technology companies or whether they are small family firms which have been going quite comfortably for a long time. So I think some of this analysis has probably just been a little bit simplistic. Q: (Nick Botham, University of Manchester) I agree entirely with the principle that universities should base their curricula on the assessment of business needs. But as an academic there are problems: universities are businesses and we are desperately competing against each other for customers; I can say pretty confidently that next October there will be a lot of redundancies in universities, because of a failure to recruit students. There may even be some universities that go out of business next October. If you work in a university, one of the first things you learn about the market place is the majority of students do not want to study vocationally-relevant subjects. The huge demand is for art, history, sociology, theatre studies and so on. If you are a vice-chancellor and you set yourself up to run a completely vocationally-relevant university, you will go out of business. I now see universities reacting to these market forces and putting out the courses that the students want to take which are not the vocationally-relevant ones. Q: It is important to focus a little bit on encouraging women, encouraging people from under-represented groups to start their own business is not very well covered. Tom Cannon: I think that is a very important point, although there is some evidence that women entrepreneurs are more willing to engage in continuous personal development and lifelong learning than male entrepreneurs. Certainly US and British evidence suggests that women are more likely to develop this kind of strategy. This probably explains why women-owned businesses are generally more successful than men-owned businesses.
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