Résumé
In France, a "Very Small Enterprise" (VSE) is defined as a legally independent company with fewer than 10 salaried employees. VSEs are characterized by a great deal of movement in the creation, transformation, and disappearance of jobs and the extent of turnover, which seems tied with intensive use of public employment programs, notably apprenticeship. Apprenticeship contracts seem to play a decisive role in the hiring of young employees in VSEs. They contribute above all to easing the initial entry of the new VSEs into the economy and of low-skilled young people into the labor market. French legislation is representative of the way continuing vocational training is viewed in France: strongly tied to the model of the large enterprise, it is not considered real training unless it takes place outside the usual work station and without significant participation in the company's production activity. The demand for continuing training in the VSEs remains slight. They tend to request sporadic actions in the acquisition and upgrading of technical skills. Company heads distrust continuing training for such reasons as the following: their own success that had little to do with academic learning; school learning that does not correspond to the ways knowledge is transmitted in VSEs; risk of introducing heterogeneous practices where diversity is threatening to the small team size; and breakdown of the family-like relationship. (YLB)