L&D 2020: Shaping change in learning

Work & Business

Small Businesses

Small businesses have greatly grown in number in recent years and now employ over half of the private sector workers in the developed world. Since 2010 they have also been responsible for creating roughly 75% of new private sector jobs¹.

Small businesses compete in two main ways. First are those that continue to supply local markets especially in food retailing and personal services. However the real growth has been in the second category, with highly trained and highly prized specialists using their creativity and agility in new industries and new markets². Often they join together using technology to collaborate in networks to compete against big business.

Many commentators attribute this growth to the digital infrastructure grown since the 1990s which has reduced the costs of starting and running a small business, at the same time as opening up the global markets to small businesses.

The marketplace is complex, requiring an increasingly sophisticated set of management skills for small business people. Responsibility for skill development in these small businesses rests with individuals who source it from the external market or from the increasing number of professional guilds.

The face of entrepreneurs has changed dramatically in the last 20 years and we now have the most diverse pool of entrepreneurs ever:

• baby boomers (now aged 56-74) are the most well known group starting their own businesses using access to capital from housing equity, broad job skills ad extensive personal networks. These are the not-for-retiring sort who see creating their own business as a more flexible work environment than corporate jobs used to give them.
• mid-career women who since 1995 have increasingly seen their own business as an alternative to being held back by glass ceilings and unequal access to the top in big business
• immigrants bring education and experience and a developed network/contacts from their country of origin. The bi-lingual, bi-cultural approach is ideal for creating businesses that link markets and enable businesses to be both global and local, and to source materials and goods in one market to sell in another.

Entrepreneurship used to be seen as something one learned only through experience and mentoring. The growth and success of entrepreneurial courses has changed this view.

1. Intuit Future of Small Business Report, 2007, www.iftf.org

2. Outsights on the global economy: non-economic drivers, 2005 www.outsights.co.uk

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