Organisational Skill Formation Processes in Small-and Medium-sized Engineering Companies: A Welsh-German Comparison

The proposed paper represents early findings from a major research project entitled “Training for Multi-skilling: a comparison of British and German experience,” which is financed under the Economic and Social Research Council's Learning Society Initiative and is being carried out by a team from CASS and the School of Education, University of Wales Cardiff. The project investigates the problems and practices associated with expanding the skill base of intermediate-level employees in small- and medium-sized enter-prises (SMEs) in three economic sectors, the first of which is the engineering industry. Thus, at the heart of this paper stand themes of training and skill in contemporary manufacturing, of work organisation, and company structure to become “learning organisations”. Furthermore, since the project fieldwork contrasts the experiences of engineering companies domestically in Wales and in two regions of the Federal Republic of Germany, the paper also provides an extremely pertinent comparison of the roles of different national structures of industrial and workplace organisation.