Unique education for economic growth in micro companies

Affärskraft Värmland is a competence development project initiated and owned by The Wermland Chamber of Commerce. It’s purpose is to increase the level of businessman-ship in regional companies with up to nine employees, thus boosting the economic growth in the entire region. Swedish studies performed by Tillväxtverket (The Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth) indicate a strong connection between competence development and economic growth in small companies.

An additional purpose of Affärskraft Värmland is to act as a catalyst for the development of regional networks and cooperations.

The County Of Värmland has 12.791 companies. 90% of these have less than 10 employees. Therefore, micro companies are a pivotal group of companies in our county. If we can help them grow it will have an impact on our entire region.

Affärskraft Värmland will run for three years. During that time 800 individuals will receive competence development, adding up to a total of 27.000 hours of education.

Every participating company pays a fee of 1.000 Swedish Crowns (approx. 107 €), which includes competence development of up to nine employees.

The project is funded by the European Social Fund and Region Värmland, and has a budget of approximately 1.3 million €.

Activities

The Affärskraft Värmland curriculum includes ten different courses within six subjects relevant to businessmanship. We offer courses in marketing, economy, project management, leadership, sales development and business law. Within some of these subjects we offer an introductory course as well as a more advanced course aimed at people who already possess elementary knowledge. Courses span from 2-4 days, and are performed in groups of up to 12 students.

For participating companies the project starts with a 4 hour business development seminar, hosted by a business consultant. The purpose of this seminar is to analyse what competence participating companies need in order to increase their economic growth. Theese seminars are performed in groups of up to 12 people and are attended by only one person (preferably the CEO) from each company.

After the business development seminar every company is required to perform an internal workshop to determine what competence each employee needs to develop.

Next, every employee will get a login to our website, where they can sign up to the course they want to attend and administer their participation in the project.

We have engaged local consultants as teachers and process leaders.

Target group

Affärskraft Värmland is open to any company with less than ten employees. However there are a few requirements: 

• The participating company must have their head office listed in the County of Värmland.
• The participating company is required to have at least one financial year behind them.
• The participating company must be the owners main source of income.
• The participating company must not have participated in previous projects funded by the European Social Fund.

Goals

Alongside the purely educational goals we have a number of goals connected to the demographics of the participants:

• We should have an equal distribution of gender throughout the entire project. This means that we should have an equal amount (at least 40-60%) of male and female participants. It also means that at least 35% of the participating companies should be owned and managed by women.
• At least 5% of the participating companies should be owned or managed by a person of foreign background.
• We should have participating companies from all the 16 municipalities in the County of Värmland.

At the moment (03-12-2010) exactly 50% of the participating companies are owned/managed by women, 49% of all participants are women, and 12% of the participating companies are owned/managed by a person of foreign background. The only goal who has yet to be met is the last one. At the moment we have participating companies from 14 of the Värmland municipalities.

Partners & Cooperation

For this project we have partnered up with all 16 municipalities and all the economic clusters in the County of Värmland. All in all we have 28 partners that help us recruit participants for the project. These partners are pivotal for the success of the project, since they increase the reach of our marketing and bring it down to a personal level.

We also have a close cooperation and exchange of experiences with two sister projects in the County of Dalarna and the the County of Gävleborg.

Evaluation

In order to track our progress and secure the quality of our work we evaluate every aspect of the project. All students are required to evaluate the course they attend. An external team of researcher are contracted to evaluate what impact our project has on regional economic growth.