People Development in Small Firms

The positive relationship between firm size and training has been well documented in the literature. The purpose of this study was to examine the nature of training and development in smaller firms in greater depth by examining not only training expenditure, but the incidence of training by type of employee and its impact on issues such as staff recruitment, product or machinery innovation.
To permit such an investigation, data was collected using a postal survey of manufacturing firms in the Coventry and Warwickshire area of England. The key findings were that smaller firms spend proportionately as much on training in
aggregate as larger firms. Where differences were apparent was in the nature of the delivery and in the type of staff who received it. On this smaller firms tended to favour on-the-job training, whilst larger firms tended to favour a multi-method approach, using external training agents among others. In terms of who received the training, manual employees were more likely to be trained, and larger firms tended to provide more management and professional/technical training. Interestingly, no relationship between training provision and recruitment problems, or between training provision and product,
process and machinery innovation were identified.