Upskilling for managers made easy

Pro

9 October 2006

The Small Firms Association (SFA) is preparing to launch a National Centre of Excellence next month that will seek to boost the management capabilities of owner-managers by providing 3,000 subsidised training days in 2007.

Established with €1.2m in government funding and the support of FAS, the centre will seek to provide a one-stop shop for finding and booking relevant available courses from a number of selected providers.

Patricia Callan, director at the SFA, said the training would help to boost the management capabilities of owner-managers and give them the skills they needed to grow their business to the next level.

Insufficient management capabilities were the cause of 40 per cent of business failures of companies that had been in existence for five years, she revealed. “People need to invest in themselves to get their business to the next level.”

The initiative was likely to focus on traditional training methods rather than e-learning and Web-based training because the feedback from owner-managers had been negative towards them.

“They like the interaction and the cut and thrust from being with other owner-managers,” Callan said. “This is another opportunity for them to meet people and network.” Owner-managers would be able to share experiences and learn from each other’s mistakes.

The SFA will be running a roadshow for the National Centre of Excellence around the country in January and February next year.

Meanwhile, SFA chairman Pat Crotty, has called on the government to focus on the traded sectors of the economy in the wake of a decline in exports with the reduction in Ireland’s share of total EU exports from 9.5 per cent in 2001 to 7.5 per cent in 2005.

He argued the Irish nation had been “behaving more like a drug addict than a well-oiled business – high on cheap money” and claimed the current boom had encouraged some businesses “into speculative rather than productive activity”.

“The prosperity of this small trading nation ultimately depends on selling more of our goods and services in the global markets, which is what spawned the Celtic Tiger in the first place,” Crotty told the SFA annual conference.

He called for specific measures in the budget to assist companies to control their energy costs through an Industry Energy Efficiency Fund, along with a major readjustment to the R&D tax credit scheme “to ensure that it becomes a workable scheme to support small Irish businesses in increasing their R&D activity”.

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