We need to learn how to love digital learning ‘again’: European SMEs response to COVID-19 digital learning needs

Digital transformation has become an increasingly hot topic and has posed questions around the role of Human Resource Development (HRD) moving forward. Since March 2020, the Covid-19 virus, national restrictions and social distance have affected our daily activities and changed every aspect of our life. The virus has brought with it the challenge of managing work and social interactions remotely. Using digital technology to do our jobs was hard. It was new but it was, and still is, intense. Everyone should agree with the point that it has certainly affected our ability to work with short and long-term impact on how tasks are designed and how people can contribute to work. The scope of this review is simply to assess and evaluate the impact of COVID-19 towards European Small and Medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), how they could emerge from the pandemic and to what extent they have the skills and abilities to fully utilize digital learning in the future. SMEs represent the backbone of the European economy as they account for 99% of businesses with 24 million SMEs in the European Union. They generate more than half of the EU’s gross domestic product while they employed about 100 million workers before the pandemic. National restrictions have more severe effect on SMEs (OECD 2020) as they have less capital, fewer assets and lower productivity. However, we know that SMEs find ways to manage the risks which threaten to disrupt essential processes and services (Gibb and Buchanan 2006). The International Labour Organisation (2020) argues that sustaining business operations will be particularly difficult for SMEs, therefore investment in digital skills and learning is the only way to overcome these implications in the future (Li, Ghosh, and Nachmias 2020).