Vocational education, training and organizational change: a small business perspective

In Britain, a healthy and growing small business sector has progressively come to be seen as the long-term solution to the nation's ‘relative’ economic decline. Endemic skill shortages in the small business sector are perceived as a major handicap to the nation-wide effort to rejuvenate the flagging British economy. An expanding and increasingly diverse vocational education and training (VET) system has been hailed as the panacea to the drawbacks of a poorly educated and trained labour force. The disappointing impact of contemporary training initiatives betrays the wide credibility gap that exists between VET rhetoric and the needs of small business owner/managers.