Abstract:

Raising the level of education and improving professional knowledge and skills is the basis for applying new technologies and future growth and development of enterprises. As generators of growth and development, micro-enterprises are aware of their resource limitations, especially human resources. Therefore, they are focused on improving entrepreneurial competencies, knowledge, and human resources skills so that their companies can create the conditions for a more stable, competitive, and successful business in the coming period. In this paper, the level of use of knowledge and skills of micro-enterprises´ employees in the Republic of Croatia is analyzed. The aim is to present the results of comparative analyzes of two empirical studies on the use of knowledge and skills in micro-enterprises conducted in 2016 and 2020 on a sample of 112 and 121 micro-enterprises from three activities: manufacturing, construction and agriculture, fisheries and forestry from the region of Slavonia and Baranja in Croatia. Based on the obtained results, it can be seen that there has been a decrease in the application of management skills, while there has been an increase in the application of sales skills and foreign language skills. Compared to the results from 2016, there is a visible change in the growth of management skills courses, IT courses, communication skills, foreign language courses and a higher percentage of entrepreneurs who intend to participate and educate employees in all these courses. When processing data collected by survey research, it was used descriptive and inferential statistics procedures.

Keywords:

Micro-entrepreneurs, human resources, education and skills, entrepreneurial competence.