New trends for continuous training in small and medium enterprises

A project, called Qualification 2000, supported by the EC's Adapt initiative has been developed. The project focuses on the use of multimedia and net-based educational tools for continuous training in informatics and its applications in office automation. In this paper, we shall discuss the main lines of the project, focusing on the method we adopted in order to transfer research results on computer based training to small-medium enterprises (SMEs). In particular, we shall focus on the analysis of needs we performed, and on the results we obtained from the cases studied. Then we will analyse the influence of these results on course design, through five prototypes. This analysis aims to make a constructive contribution to the discussion on how to render computer based systems an effective tool for training in SMEs.