The size of a firm influences rates of worker participation in continuing vocational training (CVT) courses. The indicator is defined as the percentage of those employed in small enterprises (employing 10 to 49 persons) who participated in employer sponsored CVT courses in 2020, the year the survey was conducted. The indicator can be compared to the average across all enterprises covered by the survey (those employing more than 10 or more people) that providing employer-sponsored training).
Workers in small firms participating in CVT courses (%)
Source: Eurostat, Continuing Vocational Training Survey (CVTS).
Key points
On average, 27.5% of staff in small firms in the EU participated in employer- sponsored CVT courses during 2020, considerably lower than the 42.4% in all firms (regardless of size). The share of those employed in small firms participating in CVT was the highest in Czechia (at 79.2%), followed by Spain Sweden, Slovenia, and Belgium (all higher than 40%). Lowest participation (below 10%) were reported in Romania, Greece and Hungary. Compared to 2015, participation levels in the EU as a whole and in most countries fell in 2020, the year that economies and societies were hit by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the EU, there was an estimated fall of 2.4 percentage points in participation in employer- sponsored CVT courses by employees in small firms’ workers, larger than the corresponding overall average for participation. At country level, the share of small firms’ workers engaging in employer sponsored CVTS courses decreased most in Finland (by 20.9 percentage points), Slovakia (15.4) and Slovenia (13.5). In some countries participation went up, with the highest increases in Spain (by 4.2 percentage points), Estonia, Latvia and Italy (by about two percentage points). Among non-EU countries data were available for Norway (42.6.% in 2020 and down by 10.5 percentage points compared to 2015) and Serbia (16.4%).
Table 8. Workers in small firms participating in CVT courses (%)
Source: Eurostat, Continuing Vocational Training Survey (CVTS). Notes: b): ‘break in time series’; data are not presented when they are not available and/or do not support sufficiently reliable comparisons across countries or over time.
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