Treatment description
Each firm is only offered one of the four support schemes: business training for the entrepreneur, one-on-one consulting to the entrepreneur, support to hire a new worker (insourcing) or support to contract an external specialist (outsourcing). A fifth group doesn’t receive any support. Business training: A mix of 25 hours online and 12 days of classroom-based business training covering five core modules on financial management, general operations, writing a business plan, marketing management and human resources. Optional modules are also available on enterprise governance, personal productivity and tourism/hospitality.
All business trainers have some form of skill certification, 82 per cent have postgraduate education and an average over 15 years of work experience. Trainers don’t directly carry out any activities for the firm but instead try to increase the entrepreneur’s skills.
One-on-one consulting: The government pays for business consultants to provide 11 days (88 hours) of personalised consulting to the entrepreneurs. The support starts with an initial visit to review the current business situation and propose a list of business areas upon which the consultant can advise. These areas are tailored to each firm based on their needs, but they typically focus on management, finance and accounting, marketing and sales, operations and human resources. Ten more meetings follow over a period of six to nine months and at least once a month.
The consultants are from local companies that applied to work with the GEM project. They are screened based on qualifications and expertise, then given 5 to 10 days of training on value-added consultancy support. Consultants average over 12 years of work experience, are highly educated, with 88 per cent having postgraduate degrees, and most of them have some formal skill certification (80 per cent).
Insourcing: The firm is given access to an online marketplace where they can choose a human resources (HR) service provider to help them recruit an accounting or marketing specialist to join the firm as a full-time employee and carry out the relevant business function. If the firm decides to hire a worker, it receives an initial subsidy to cover the HR provider’s service fee plus monthly subsidies to support, at a decreasing rate, the worker’s wage during eight additional months.
Insourced workers are much younger on average (around 29 years old), have less work experience (3.5 years) and are less likely to possess a postgraduate degree (32 per cent) or formal skills certification (24 per cent) than the professionals in the other support schemes.
Outsourcing: The firm is given access to an online marketplace where they can choose an accounting or marketing service provider who can be contracted to perform tasks in the respective functional area. If the firm decides to contract a service provider, it receives a declining monthly subsidy over nine months of the same value as the subsidy provided in the insourcing intervention. The external professional is required to spend at least one day a week doing these tasks.
The outsourced specialists are similar to the business consultants in terms of experience, although they’re less likely to have a postgraduate degree (59 per cent) or formal skills certification (67 per cent).
