Why Learning  Development is Vital to SME Business Growth?

Why Learning & Development is Vital to SME Business Growth? 

Learning & Development is no longer a nice-to-have, it is central to any business’s development and growth plans.  For SME’s developing people is vital to growing a SME business. People cost money to employ, people cost money to replace and people cost money to manage if they are not doing tasks efficiently. In today’s economy finding, keeping and developing people is often the biggest challenge for SME’s.

The modern workplace also requires people to learn new skills and keep up to date with existing skillsets. For example, the importance of digital skills has never been more important for SME’s. A new report by Oxford Economics has identified that improving the digital skills and connectivity of SMEs could add up to £15.3 billion to the UK economy.

For SME’s upskilling people with appropriate digital tools could add £9.9 billion, or 0.5% of total UK GDP. That would dramatically impact upon key cities which have strong digital business footprints such as Bristol (£14.8 billion), Liverpool (£13.4 billion) and Sheffield (£12.6 billion),

SMEs are the backbone of the UK economy, accounting for more than 90% of employment in the UK. The opportunity for SME’s is huge, but they are falling behind due to a lack of investment in digital skills. For example, while businesses with more than 250 employees derive 25.4% of their turnover from e-commerce sales, for SMEs this proportion falls to just 6.98%.

That gap is set to continue to grow unless SME’s invest in digital skills, an area of high and sustained growth for businesses across all sectors. To highlight why this gap is set to continue, we need to just look at the Learning & Development culture between SME’s and larger companies.  Only 6.7% of SME’s offer training to develop ICT/IT skills, compared to 67.6% of firms with 250+ employees.

Retaining staff is lower cost than hiring new ones. SME’s last year spent on average £300 per employee. Companies that spent more than that amount find that employees were twice as happy and have lower costs of retention of skilled staff.  That’s a small investment for SME’s that makes a big difference.

Building a package of support and resources for employees is vital for SME’s to be able to win the right people, develop the right people and retain the right people. One simple step is to look at online learning support packages.

Providing online learning & development support using resources such as IMPROVE online learning platform enables companies to develop their people in a cost-effective way, with a low annual investment and a low downtime for the business.