PEO — Digital Skills for the Labour Market: a training call closed in August 2024

The AM PEO announcement carries four verifiable coordinates. The applicant guide for the digital skills call was published as an archive of about 1.24 MB. Funding comes from Priority P9, dedicated to strengthening participation in lifelong learning so as to ease transitions and mobility. The specific objective is ESO4.7, and the measure is 9.g.7, implementation of the digital skills programme.

The calendar, as published: MySMIS2021 opened on 28 May 2024 at 16:00, and the submission deadline was 23 August 2024 at 16:00. The announcement page shows no extension and no subsequent round of the measure.

What the announcement does not carry: the call budget, the maximum project value and the target-group eligibility conditions. Those sit in the guide, and the guide is downloaded from the source. We do not reproduce them from memory and we do not estimate them.

One point we deliberately leave open: who could be the applicant. On training lines the applicant is not automatically the employer — it can be a training provider, an association or a public body, with the company appearing as part of the target group. The announcement does not settle this, the guide does, so the fact sheet shows no beneficiary category we have not read.

Until the check of 30 July 2026, this page said the guide was published while the submission window had not launched, and recommended using the interval for preparation. Submissions had already run, between 28 May and 23 August 2024. The error survived because the text was carried over from the previous version of the page instead of being re-read in the managing authority's announcement.

We state it explicitly for the same reason we correct figures on other pages: anyone checking us should find the mistake here too, not only the clean version. The fact sheet now shows the status as closed and the submission deadline as 23 August 2024, and the source remains the official announcement, which we link directly.

A skills line finances the process by which people learn: organising the programmes, the trainers, the materials, the assessment and the certification of participants. As a rule it does not finance licence purchases, application development or the equipment trained staff will use. The concrete check happens in one place — the eligible-cost list in that call's guide.

The clearest comparison comes from the national recovery plan. Under investment C7 I19, de minimis aid of at most EUR 17,000 per SME was granted exclusively as training programmes across nine technology domains. A company that read that ceiling as a digitalization budget lost a year of planning to an assumption.

We say this knowing it takes us out of the project. If a training line does not reimburse software, the company needs a second source for the technical part, and we only appear there — not in the course budget.

Digital training for employees has a clear lineage in Romania, and knowing it helps calibrate expectations. The first generation was POCU, in the 2014-2020 period, with calls dedicated to the digital skills of employees in smaller companies. The second was the recovery plan, through investment C7 I19 run by ADR, built as a de minimis scheme delivered entirely as courses. The third is PEO, in the 2021-2027 programming period, with the call discussed here submitted and closed in the summer of 2024.

What changes from one generation to the next is not the objective but the mechanism: who the applicant is, who the target group is, whether the money reaches the employer or the training provider, and what is actually reimbursed. An employer who only asks how much is on offer misses precisely the details that decide whether they can take part.

The first item costs nothing and survives any change of rules: an inventory of the skills already present in the team, set against what the work actually requires. Who works with which tools, where time is lost, which processes still run on paper or in scattered files — the answers are the raw material of any training application.

The second item is alignment with a technical plan. Training without tools stays a certificate on the wall; tools without training stay unused licences. A plan stating which applications enter the company, in what order and on what budget turns a training project from a justifiable expense into a measurable investment.

The third item is source discipline, and this page is its own example: for every claim, note where it came from and on what date it was read. Without that, a sentence lifted from a summary survives for years after it has become false.

Northdan Soft is a software supplier. We do not deliver courses, we are not an authorised vocational training provider, we do not assess a company's eligibility and we do not draft the funding application. We promise no approval and issue no verdicts that only the managing authority can give.

What we deliver is the technical part: internal applications, digitalized workflows, reporting tools, plus the documents a dossier needs from a supplier — functional specification, technical offer, budget by cost category and the acceptance documents for reimbursement.