MINISTER FOR Enterprise and Trade Batt O’Keeffe will make funding available to help improve management training skills for small and medium enterprises.

Mr O’Keeffe will announce over the weekend that his department will provide €1.4 million over the next 12 months for a nationwide pilot programme.

If successful, the programme will be expanded. The Minister said he was taking the initiative because he became concerned after studying a recent comparative study of management skill. It showed that Irish companies were lagging behind their counterparts in the EU and other OECD countries.

“It struck me most that Ireland was ranked 10th out of 14 when it comes to management training, trailing behind the US and also behind firms in Northern Ireland,” he told The Irish Times. The move also comes on foot of Forfás research for the Management Development Council, published in March, which identified areas for improvement in management practice among SMEs.

“These skills are vital. If we provide funding to improve management capabilities in the SME sector, then many more firms will survive.

“Employment will increase and SME profits will be boosted.

“There is a lack of appreciation of the concept of management development in Ireland.

“There is also confusion over the quality of the courses. There seems to be limited access and there has also been the cost issue,” he said.

Mr O’Keeffe said he will now pilot a scheme whereby there will be seven management development networks across the country.

Skillnets, one of the Governments enterprise and training support bodies, will develop seven regional management development networks this year – two in Dublin, and one each in the west, southwest, midlands, northwest and southeast.

Mr O’Keeffe added that there had been many management courses set up in the past – some costing significant sums of money – but there had been insufficient information on how successful or useful many of them had been.

He said that monitoring would be a prerequisite of the new initiative. “I will insist on clear outcome targets for the training and on regular evaluation of the networks effectiveness,” said Mr OKeeffe.

He referred to a recent McKinsey report which estimated that bringing the poorest performing firms in Ireland up to average levels of management skills could be worth between €500 million and €2.5 billion in terms of increased gross value added in the manufacturing sector alone.