POCU „Digital skills for employees of large enterprises”: EUR 10 million, a state aid scheme and a window that closed on 15 November 2020

The official title is „Digital skills for employees of large enterprises”, a call launched by the Ministry of European Funds through the managing authority for the Human Capital Operational Programme, under Priority Axis 3, Specific Objective 3.12. The applicant guide and its annexes were published as a 5.11 MB archive attached to the announcement.

The call budget: EUR 10 million, a figure that includes both the European Union contribution and the national contribution. The funding area: exclusively the less developed regions, named in the announcement as Centru, Sud-Est, Sud Muntenia, Nord-Est, Nord-Vest, Vest and Sud-Vest Oltenia.

Submissions ran through MySMIS2014 between 17 August and 15 November 2020. That was the only window; POCU 2014-2020 has ended and the call has no relaunch.

The first is the budget: EUR 10 million here, against EUR 20 million on the call dedicated to SME employees. The second is the deadline: 15 November 2020 here, 30 October 2020 there — 16 days more, even though both opened on 17 August 2020.

The third, and the most substantive: the large-enterprise call has an associated state aid scheme for organising and running adult training programmes, stated explicitly in the announcement. The SME call does not carry that note in its own announcement.

What does not differ: the axis and specific objective, the implementation area across the seven less developed regions, and the absence of the Bucharest-Ilfov region from the list. Both calls financed people, not technology.

When training is delivered to a large enterprise, the economic advantage reaches a firm competing on the market, so the support qualifies as state aid rather than a plain public service. In practice the value of the training received is attributed to the company and reported as such, even where the project is run by someone else.

The concrete parameters of the scheme — intensities, covered costs, reporting obligations — are those in the scheme documents and in the applicant guide attached to the announcement. We do not reproduce them here from secondary sources; for a company reconstructing its own aid history today, the source is the official document.

The note stays practically relevant: a large company that was a target group in such a project most likely has a state aid value recorded against its name from that period, and that counts towards cumulation in later years.

The target group was the employees of large enterprises. The applicant, meaning the entity signing the funding application, is the one defined in the applicant guide published as an archive on the call page; on POCU training calls that role generally fell to training providers and social partners, not to the beneficiary companies.

We do not publish the exact list of eligible applicants because we could not reopen the guide archive at the date of this verification. We preferred to say so plainly rather than fill the gap with a list taken from elsewhere.

The model matters for planning today: a large company wanting publicly funded training generally allies with a training provider or with the social partners who build the project, instead of applying on its own.

In 2021-2027, digital skills training is funded through the Education and Employment Programme, the successor of POCU. Those calls have their own guides, calendars and conditions, tracked on our dedicated pages so an archive is never mixed up with a current status.

Northdan Soft is not an accredited training provider, does not run courses and cannot be a partner on the training component of such a project. If that is what you need, we are not the right address, and that is more useful in the first sentence than after three conversations.

What we do build are the tools the trained team then uses: internal applications, integrations between systems, automations and the accompanying technical documentation. For large companies we also work in a dedicated-team format, with cadence and deliverables set by contract. We do not draft funding applications and we do not promise approvals.