Result of cooperation between SENAI (Sao Paulo, Brazil) and the IIEP, specifically sets out to analyse the relation between education, training and work in small-scale firms, studies the role and place of these firms in the Brazilian economy, investigates how these small firms function and survive at a time of severe economic crisis, as well as who their managers are and how they are trained, finally looks into the personnel policies of these small firms and the sort of manpower they recruit, in order to draw some conclusions for educational and training policies