QUICK FLICK through some of the brochures offering professional and ongoing education courses leaves one in little doubt that education and training are expensive.

However, a close look at the pricing structures also suggests that many training organisations add a premium to certain course fees - presumably on the assumption that most of those attending are being paid for by their employers.

In reality, few small companies have enough money or spare capacity to fund expensive training courses or to release people from work for days. And individuals deciding to pursue courses on their own initiative are often faced with hefty fees, on which they can claim no tax relief.

Carmel O'Carroll of Image Development employs six full time staff, and she has experienced these difficulties at first hand. "The problem of training for small business is not a single one, it has a number of dimensions," she says.

"To begin with, there is the issue of management training for the entrepreneur or person running the company both in terms of the cost of courses and their content. Second, there is the issue of how one handles staff training in a small company.

"We are inundated with mailshots about training courses, many of which cost a lot of money and are not very specific in terms of what they are going to deliver. With such a small staff, I could not afford to have people out of the office for long periods of time, and I need to be sure that whatever training we do is relevant and productive."

A former air hostess who set up Image Consultants to advise companies on their corporate "look" 10 years ago, her clients include Aer Rianta, the ESB and the Irish Permanent; however, she says, her management training was mainly by "trial and error on the job". There is a gaping need, she says, for cost effective training which meets the needs of small organisations.

Frank Mulcahy, director of the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association, agrees. ISME has recently launched a pilot programme aimed at tackling management development in small and medium sized companies.

"The uptake of assistance available for management development by small business has been falling well short of what is available, for no apparent reason," he says. "So we spoke to over 400 companies about the role and scope for management development within their organisations, and on the basis of this feed back organised a series of meetings around the country whereby people could air their views on what was needed and how it should be structured.

"Over the next two months discuss ions will be held in Waterford, Galway, Limerick, Athlone, Kilkenny and Dublin - and anyone interested can contact ISME directly," Mulcahy says.

O'Carroll was a participant in one of the sessions already held in Dublin. She says "it was reassuring to find 39 people in the same boat as yourself. It was very useful in identifying problems and needs and it was very positive to discover that your experiences were commonplace not the result of some shortcoming in your own management style."

Paul Tansey of economic consultants Tansey, Webster and Associates, is one of the program me leaders for the pilot. Many traditional management training courses, he says, do not suit the needs of small business, either in format or content. "Owner managers are used to standing on their own feet, and they are very familiar with the nuts and bolts of getting things done - so the last thing they need is someone telling them what to do," he says.

"Furthermore, most of the textbooks for management courses deal with situations in large organisations; the problems and strategies they discuss have little relevance within the structure of a small business.

"The ISME programme is management development rather than management training, and we felt that the best way for owner managers to learn is from each other, because they have respect and regard for each other's achievements."

The ISME pilot uses a case study format: a businessperson who has started a business from scratch tells the group how it was done and what problems were encountered along the way. After a Q&A session, the speaker's presentation is responded to formally, and an attempt is made to set his or her experience within the broader context of small Irish companies.

"We are using the sessions as a scanning process to identify what are the management or training weaknesses within small and medium sized companies," Tansey says. "The second stage will be translate this into appropriate functional training.