Whilst change and uncertainty have been somewhat longstanding characteristics or features of the business support landscape over the last 20 years, the last four years have been somewhat turbulent.
We have seen organisations disappear from the landscape, new organisations emerge, programmes withdrawn and the extent and nature of existing schemes change. For example, in 2013, a number of LEPs secured funding for Growth Hubs through their City Deal applications, a key element of which is allocated to providing a range of co-ordinated funding and advice services to business.
This month saw all LEPs awarded funding to develop growth hubs, with the size of the awards varying across the LEP network. LEPs are also busy with developing commissioning frameworks for the next round of European funding which will be coming on stream from middle of 2015. It is likely that this will lead to further changes in the business support landscape.
In addition, expectations around the role of the business support professional have changed. For the most of the 2000s, the emphasis was on the provision of business advice. Then the enterprise coach emerged in the landscape in the late 2000s to be replaced by the enterprise mentor since the election of the Coalition government in 2010. Recent mapping exercises undertaken by SFEDI have highlighted a continual growth in enterprise mentoring programmes in England over the last couple of years, both as stand-alone offerings and being part of other offerings. Within the Growth Hubs, it is likely that the role of business support information officer will come to the fore again.
What does it mean for the small business owner-manager? Whilst there will be a number of calls around helping owner-managers make sense of perceived complexity and confusion in this ever changing landscape, this only relates to a relatively small proportion of small businesses.
Despite the volume of research on the take-up of small business support, we are still not sure what is the level of take-up and whether this level is good, poor or indifferent. There are still groups of small businesses who are blissfully unaware that there is a business support industry out there. To this end, it will be interesting to see how effective Growth Vouchers will be in engaging with businesses who have traditionally not used business support.
What does this all mean in terms of learning and skills development for business support professionals?
Our experiences in mapping business support for LEPs would suggest that simply making sense of the changing landscape and understanding what is going on is a key requirement. This will be important if staff working in the emerging Growth Hubs are going to be working with small businesses to help them navigate the business support landscape, particularly in terms of connecting national programmes of support with local provision.
A recent update to the business and enterprise support NOS by SFEDI suggests that there is now a greater emphasis on understanding how to work with growth-orientated businesses, more emphasis on supporting peer to peer learning and less on more traditional business advice models and an increasing blurring of the boundaries between business support and enterprise education.
As a result, expectations around the business support professional are evolving as well. So, for business support professionals, is it currently a case of trying to paint a picture by numbers where the numbers are constantly changing?
We would like to hear what you think about the changes in the business support landscape and the implications for learning and skills development for the business support professional.
For further information on the work of SFEDI with making sense of the current and future business support and enterprise learning and skills development landscape, please contact Leigh Sear at [email protected].