Supporting small businesses with the skills they need to grow

Peers can support fellow small business owners by sharing business practices, facilitating new connections, and offering tailored advice. 80% of small businesses believe interacting with peers improves their business outcomes.

Mentoring offers relationship-based guidance from experienced business owners for small businesses to develop new skills and networks to support growth. Digital channels have increased the availability and convenience of mentoring.

For small businesses who want to grow, hiring new staff is not the only option—they could also consider outsourcing. Outsourcing enables small businesses to strengthen and execute their operations and improve efficiency.

Training programs that are delivered digitally show promise for small business owners with limited time to access key information when they need it. Digital training is convenient, cost-effective, and engaging, so long as it is designed well.

Training that is delivered to small businesses through digital channels is increasingly promising. It can integrate techniques that increase knowledge retention and user engagement, leading to positive impacts for small business capacity building.

The pandemic challenged traditional approaches to monitoring, evaluation and learning systems for business support programs, presenting new opportunities for optimization, learning, and impact measurement.