Our present knowledge on competence development in organisations is to a great extent based on studies of larger private companies, public organizations and public authorities. Small and Medium-sized Enterprises - SMEs – have to a large extent been neglected. The relatively low interest concerning SMEs is in this respect noteworthy as two of three employees work in SMEs and over 99 percent of all enterprises are small or medium-sized (Hill, 2004). Considering available studies of competence development in SMEs some general notions can be made. First, there is a wide range of practices with respect to competence development in SMSs, activities take place in different forms and under diverse conditions (Kitching & Blackburn, 2002). Second, SMEs differ with respect to the importance they attach to compe-tence development, and how opportunities to take on competence development are perceived (Hill & Stewart, 1999). Third, and this is an important point of departure for this paper, several recent studies indicate that owners/managers seem to play important roles in facilitating/impeding learning and competence development in small firms (Coetzer, 2006; Kock, Gill & Ellström, 2008). The purpose of this paper is to identify, describe, and discuss how owners/managers in SMEs understand the role of learning and competence development activities in the workplace. Specifically the paper focus on how managers i SMEs understand why the firm should take on competence development, in what forms competence development activities should be ac-complished and the expected effects from competence development.

The results derive from a recently completed research project (2006) with the overall aim of studying learning and development processes in SMEs. The studied SMEs all have in common that they have received support for competence development from the European Social Fund. The study has a longitudinal character and is based on semi structured interviews with owners/managers in six SMEs during 2002-2006.

The mangers/owners view on why the company should engage in competence development can be devided into two broad categories: motives categorized as opportunistic and motives categorized as business oriented. The motives seems to be related to several organizational conditions, e.g. external pressure, previous experiences from participating in programmes for competence development, the learning environment of the firm, etc. Conclusions is made concerning what type of SMEs that should participate/not participate in public programmes for competence development.