Businesses of tomorrow: training courses for family businesses

The Minister for Enterprise Miriam Dalli, together with The Malta Chamber, the Family Business Office and Malta Enterprise, launched training courses aimed for family businesses.

Family businesses amount to more than 70% of small and medium enterprises, who faces particular challenges that require different needs. The training courses will be offered for free and sessions will be held online on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.

The Minister for Enterprise Miriam Dalli urged family businesses to be at the forefront in adapting these processes to be resilient.

“It is not always easy for these businesses to adapt to certain processes, such as recruiting non family members, set up a board, adapt new technologies or to perform auditing processes and management on a global level. These are the challenges that we need to address if we want the Maltese economy to continue to be competitive and resilient, as well as addressing the needs of our businesses. As Government we are offering assistance to businesses and continuous training for the employers, however the operations deserve all the support during the renewal of the business,” explained Minister Miriam Dalli.

The sessions have been drafted by the Chairperson of the Family Business committee within The Malta Chamber, Silvan Mifsud. He remarked that “challenges brought by the pandemic and the new challenges faced due to geopolitical tensions, family businesses need to have better structure, and take strategic decisions, be more flexible and more efficient to adapt to the market that they operate in. For this aim the committee for family businesses within the Chamber of Commerce felt the need to offer training specifically on this regard”.

The Regulator of the Family Business Office, Dr Joe Gerada, explained how these sessions are additional tools amongst other schemes offered by the Family Business Office in collaboration with the Malta Enterprise. “Through our experience we meet with various businesses on daily basis, thus we felt the need to provide these sessions whilst we urge to all those interested to participate in this short course.”

Malta Enterprise CEO Kurt Farrugia said that “It is a pleasure for us to assist family businesses with these training sessions. This goes beyond other schemes available for businesses, as Malta Enterprise have various schemes which provide assistance within operations, processes towards sustainability and digitalization, investment in machinery and offering training to employees. All this whilst offering a holistic assistances so that local businesses will continue flourish and be resilient.”