The frequently asked questions about the Federal Learning Account (FLA)

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: 

• If you employ more than 20 employees, you need to prepare an annual training plan and
• set up a system of individual training rights. This means that you need to award your employees a number of training days on an annual basis. Exactly how many days you need to award depends on the size of your business and the sector you operate in.

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:

• knowledge transfer;
• the advancement of skills.

So the following may qualify as informal training:

• on-the-job training;
• mentoring, coaching, acquisition of know-how;
• training or education through job rotation, exchanges, study visits and secondments;
• participation in training or quality cycles;
• self-study and remote training (books, e-learning, courses by mail);
• attending conferences, workshops, trade fairs and lectures.

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.