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Business Enterprise and Business Support Report Released
Research for this report was conducted during September 2007 to January 2008 with financial support from the Sector Skills Development Agency. The work was led by SFEDI directors with support from GoSkills. The research was undertaken by Stratagia, Vector Research and the Wood Holmes Group. The report does not necessarily reflect the views of SFEDI. It is presented as a contribution to the development of a Qualification Strategy for business enterprise and business support
The following points briefly summarise the findings from this study.
· the Business Enterprise community of people running businesses with less than twenty employees is huge and ubiquitous; they are the overwhelming majority of businesses in every sector, nation and region of the UK. There are nearly 4.5M such businesses across the UK and over 70% of them have no employees beyond the owners.
· there are about 2.8M owner-managers and more than half a million more people working in other self-employed capacities; they constitute about one in seven of those currently in work.
· there are estimated to be almost half a million new businesses starting every year.
· expectations are that this will continue to grow even further in the coming years. Such growth offers the opportunity to meet economic objectives and to enhance social inclusion by offering opportunities to those disadvantaged in the employed labour market.
· these businesses and the people starting and running them can be very different. Any strategy for supporting their learning and development will require the development of a more sophisticated and well evidenced approach to segmenting this market. A framework for achieving this based on quality of business proposition and enterprise capabilities is suggested.
· provision also needs to be appropriate to different contexts, including social characteristics (gender, ethnicity, age, disability), location and sector.
· only a very small proportion of people starting and running businesses acquire qualifications that certify they have the business enterprise skills they need. There is huge potential to expand this, particularly at start-up, if an appropriate offer is available to all.
· owner-managers are highly reliant on experiential and informal learning to development the business abilities they need.
· over half of owner-managers do not expect to invest any time or money in their own development in the coming year.
· such investments are more likely amongst younger businesses and owner-managers, larger businesses, business aiming to grow and people with higher qualifications and experience of business or management training.
· criteria for effective provision can be summarised by the CEML recommendation to “join entrepreneurs in their world”: relevant provision, delivered by people entrepreneurs know and can trust, available when, where and how appropriate.
· finding time for development is a major constraint on existing owner-managers so bite-size provision that tackles their current business issues is crucial.
· cost can also be a barrier. A reallocation of existing public funding to allow support for more appropriate provision could help tackle this.
· providing effective start-up support can halve the rate of early business failure
· existing provision to help the unemployed enter self-employment is already saving the Government an estimated £32M a year in benefits payments.
· the business support workforce may need to triple if appropriate support is to be available to all business start-ups by 2020.
· the system for delivering business support appears to be particularly weak in England. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland support is more widely available, integrates economic and skills policy and offers longer term relationships that can better able build trust.
