Abstract:

Innovation is widely recognized as a crucial process for SME growth, sustainability and competitiveness. Innovation is also an essential process to meet the dynamic needs of the individual, the company and society in the context of globalization and high technology. Today's workers face a new challenge, namely to deal with the multitude of information and rapid technological change. Thus, lifelong learning has become a necessity, representing more than adult education and / or training, namely a mentality and a habit of acquiring new things.

The paper includes a literature review on the importance of lifelong learning for SMS, which shows that the competitive advantage of the SME grows in proportion to the investment in human capital and that given the uncertain economic climate, investment in people is increasingly important. The article also focuses on analysing the rate and duration of employee participation in continuing vocational training courses from Romanian SMEs by size classes of firms and gender and the clustering of EU countries with similar scores regarding learning-forms of work organization and innovation.

Keywords:

Lifelong learning, SMEs, innovation, gender.