Emerald

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review critically the HRD literature in the small business context in order to identify the main barriers to employee training and learning and recommend ways to overcome them.

The paper highlights the potential barriers to training and learning among small firms, looking at organizational constraints such as lack of time or limited financial resources, as well as negative attitudes towards employee training and its importance for business survival.

The available studies indicate that better access to information on the applicability and usefulness of HRD to small firms can be crucial to overcoming the barriers to skills development that exists among such firms. The analysis suggests that a key challenge for policy makers in this area is to facilitate changes in owner attitudes, improve access to training interventions and create the necessary institutional conditions to encourage SMEs to move to high value‐added trajectories.

SMEs need to invest in innovation to face fierce national and international competition and achieve an above‐average return. This article provides guidance for implementation of innovation practices that may help SMEs to overcome some of the barriers to successful innovation.

The human resource development (HRD) literature has tended to focus on larger organizations in order to develop an understanding of workforce skills development. However, it has been acknowledged that a healthy small business sector is fundamental to every corporate economy. This article helps to explore the HRD processes in these types of organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoints practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.]

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

In the current climate, winning the London Olympics seems increasingly to be a poisoned chalice. It's not helped by the fact that, as far as many observers are concerned, the post‐industrial UK has placed too much emphasis on service industries and finance, and too little on training people to “get their hands dirty” in the engineering and construction industries. The term “skills gap” illustrates a genuine and worrying concern, that not enough expertise in these areas is being developed among the latest generation of potential recruits.

Provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to digest format.

The paper argues that organizations can use corporate alumni networks to capture and transfer the knowledge of baby boomers after the latter retire.

The paper introduces the concept of corporate alumni network and explains how this tool can facilitate post‐retirement knowledge transfer.

Corporate alumni networks enable organizations to recover the know‐how and know‐who of their retired employees in two ways. On the one hand, they help employees to preserve their personal relations with retired baby boomers. As a result, employees can rely on their retired colleagues for information and referrals in the same way that they do with other members of their informal networks. On the other hand, corporate alumni networks allow organizations to create a portfolio of working retirees who can be called up when necessary.

Although most organizations are aware of the need to preserve the in‐depth knowledge of soon‐to‐retire baby boomers, they focus mostly on pre‐retirement knowledge transfer activities. The paper expands the horizon by discussing a post‐retirement strategy.