Totally up to date on the FLA?
Is your company required to set up a training plan, establish training rights and register training courses in the FLA? Find out what needs doing with Acerta.
EN
Since April 2024, the beta version of the Federal Learning Account has been up and running. What does this mean for you as an employer? Who should register? There are still a lot of questions and uncertainties about this registration tool. We listed the most frequently asked questions and provide clear answers.
The FLA is intended to make tracking training courses and managing training rights simpler and more transparent. This ensures that employers and employees alike are better informed.
To achieve lifelong learning, the Labour Deal introduces 2 obligations for employers:
The FLA stems from the Labour Deal but is being introduced through a different law.
The idea behind the FLA is to make tracking training courses and managing training rights simpler and more transparent. This ensures that employers and employees alike are better informed.
All private sector employers, including SMEs, are required to register training courses in the FLA, even if there is no individual statutory/sectoral training entitlement for the employee.
All of which means to say that training entitlement or the right to training is not the same as registration in the FLA.
Will you be penalised if you do not register these training courses? As an employer, you have a duty of information and a duty of registration, so when an employee wants to consult his/her training courses on My Career later on and these are not registered, you run the risk of ending up on the Naming and Shaming list.
You are required to register all training courses attended by your employees starting from 1 January 2024. A beta version of the FLA is currently up and running. We expect to see the final version in June 2024. You can already register all training courses with retrospective effect. When the final version is launched on 1 June, you will have until 30 November to process all the information.
This may seem a long time but if you want to know how many more training days your employees still have this year, it is important to keep track of exactly how many hours and days of training each employee has taken from the start of this year.
The law specifies that both formal and informal training related to the work or the job itself need to be registered. Exactly what does ‘informal training’ mean?
Example: are in-house training sessions on sales techniques or how to present competitive analyses to be considered informal training?
The law defines ‘informal training’ as: "training activities directly related to the work. These training courses are typified by a high degree of self-organisation by the individual learner or by a group of learners with regard to time, place and content, a content chosen to suit the individual needs of the learner at the workplace, and with a direct link to the work and the workplace, including participation in conferences or trade fairs for learning purposes."
As the law regulates the employer-employee relationship, the Administration considers that the training courses must therefore be related to the exercise of an occupational activity and aim to transfer knowledge and advance workers’ skills (= learning purposes).
So ask yourself whether these presentations or informative sessions ensure:
So the following may qualify as informal training:
A strictly work meeting between colleagues is not considered informal training.
Most employers (depending on their sector) are under obligation to provide these five days of training, but for employees, attending training courses remains a right, not an obligation.
Which means you cannot force your employees to take training courses. Of course, it is always good to enthuse and encourage your employees. For example, make sure your training courses are useful and actually contribute to growth and productivity. Our advice: create individual growth paths or career paths for your employees.
Is your company required to set up a training plan, establish training rights and register training courses in the FLA? Find out what needs doing with Acerta.
Individual training right: exactly how does it work?
Since the beginning of this year, employees are entitled to five individual training days per year. A great initiative imposed under the Labour Deal. So how do you actually make these training days work and what are the benefits?
Read moreRecruiting people with physical or mental disabilities
As an employer facing a tight labour market, it is important that you spread your net more widely when you recruit and rise above prejudices and clichés. Targeting people with physical or mental disabilities who have the right abilities is a step in the right direction, but how do you get started? Are there things to be aware of and certain condit...
Read moreIndividual training rights and training plans
The Labour Deal, training plans and individual training days for employees. What exactly do companies need to put in place and what does this involve in practice?
Read more
