The labor shortage is pushing SMEs to overcome their reservations about training employees.
Although they are still afraid that their staff will take advantage of it to then seek professional advancement elsewhere, four out of five Quebec SMEs offer them some form of training, reports the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). in an analysis of ten pages unveiled on Monday.
The fact that more than 80% of SMEs also believe that training is an important investment for their business and that it has a positive effect on their productivity is no coincidence, notes the CFIB. This indicates that we see it as a form of response to the problem of labor shortage, which forces a quarter of them to cancel or postpone projects, nearly 40% to refuse contracts and which forces almost two-thirds owners to work more hours to compensate for the lack of hands.
Do SME owners see the training offer as a way of increasing the attractiveness of their business in the eyes of workers, of compensating for the lack of skills of those they manage to find or of increasing the productivity of employees they already have, CFIB vice-president for Quebec, François Vincent, cannot say. “It’s probably a bit of all of these. »
Reluctance
What is certain is that this is done despite a certain natural reluctance, he said in a telephone interview with To have to Friday. On the one hand, because half of the companies in Quebec have fewer than five employees and when one of them is in training, this means that all the others have to work a little harder during his absence. On the other hand, because we are afraid that as soon as their training is finished, the workers put forward their new skills to go get better jobs elsewhere. Almost half of Quebec SMEs expressed this fear in 2014 to the point that one in ten preferred not to offer formal training.
But this is clearly not the case for the vast majority of them, welcomes the CFIB today. In fact, only 10% say they only offer “formal training”, that is to say provided by an institution, a firm or a specialized professional inside or outside the walls of the company and which leads to a form of official recognition. In 40% of cases, it is rather “informal training”, that is to say, offered directly by the company, whether by its owner himself, an employee or a mentor. And for the remaining 31%, we are talking about a combination of the two.
The CFIB’s analysis is essentially based on an omnibus survey conducted from April 8 to 22 of 406 owners, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9%. The training rates reported there appear higher than those measured in particular by Statistics Canada in a survey of Quebec businesses from January 4 to February 7. Asked to say what they intend to do “to overcome the obstacles related to the workforce”, 8% of companies with fewer than 5 employees and 40% of those with 100 or more employees answered: “Give employees paid time off for learning and development programs,” while 13% of the smallest companies and 40% of the largest said, “Encourage employees to take on-the-job training. »
What programs?
CFIB is generally pleased with the training available to SMEs as well as government programs to encourage them to take advantage of it. We deplore, on the other hand, that these programs are so obscure or so poorly publicized that only a quarter of companies say they know about them and that almost half do not consider them to be of any help.
The CFIB is particularly opposed to the “1% law” which obliges companies whose payroll exceeds 2 million to devote each year at least 1% of these amounts to training, otherwise they must pay the difference to a fund which goes, among others, to the Commission of Labor Market Partners. She would prefer, instead, a reduction in the overall tax burden, her surveys revealing that, unlike some large companies, this money would go to the remuneration of their employees (63%), the repayment of their debts (49%) or even to employee training (33%) and automation (30%), well ahead of increases in dividends or the owner’s salary (12%).