POCU „Digital skills for SME employees”: the seven regions, the two budgets and a call closed since 2020

The full title in the announcement is „Digital skills for SME employees”, 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 was published as an archive attached to the announcement, 8.79 MB, annexes included.

The call budget: EUR 20 million, a figure that covers both the European Union contribution and the national contribution. Out of it, EUR 1 million was allocated separately to the Integrated Territorial Investment Danube Delta territory — a separate envelope, not a scoring preference.

Submissions were filed in the MySMIS2014 system between 17 August 2020 and 30 October 2020. That is the only window of the call; there was no second session, and the POCU 2014-2020 programme has since ended.

The announcement states explicitly that only projects implemented in the less developed regions are financed, and lists them: Centru, Sud-Est, Sud Muntenia, Nord-Est, Nord-Vest, Vest, Sud-Vest Oltenia. That is seven. The Bucharest-Ilfov region, classified as a more developed region, is not there.

The rule is not specific to this call but to the architecture of the 2014-2020 funds, where the capital region had a different support regime. The practical effect was very concrete: an employer in Ilfov could not be in the target group of a project financed here, however well the company profile fitted.

The money went into training: digital-skills programmes for employees, with assessment and certification at the end. The central cost of the projects was the teaching hour, not the equipment.

What it did not finance: software licences, subscriptions, servers, custom applications, online stores, management systems. An SME looking for a grant to buy an ERP finds nothing in this archive and loses time searching. Telling a training line apart from a digitalization line is the first check any call with the word digital in its title deserves.

The consequence still shows up in the questions we receive: many companies assume that a call about digital skills also covers the tool on which the skill is acquired. It does not. These are two different budget lines, often in different programmes.

The target group of the call was the employees of SMEs. The applicant — the entity that signed the funding application and answered for the indicators — is set out in the applicant guide published as an archive on the official call page. On POCU training calls that role generally fell to vocational training providers, employers organisations and chambers of commerce, with the participating firms as beneficiaries of the services.

We do not reproduce the exact list of eligible applicants here, because we could not reopen the guide archive at the date of verification. For anyone who needs it in 2026, the source is the archive attached to the official announcement, linked in the call record above.

The distinction matters beyond the archive: the same model — an accredited intermediary as applicant, employees as target group — recurs in the training calls of today, and a company planning a publicly funded upskilling programme should know from the start that, as a rule, it is not the one filing.

For 2021-2027, digital-skills training moved into the Education and Employment Programme. The call dedicated to digital skills there has its own guide and its own calendar, and its status changes independently of this archive — which is why we keep it on a separate page rather than in this paragraph.

For companies that simply want to understand their options today on the human-resources side, our page on funding employee digital skills gathers the active and the closed routes, each with a link to the official source.

Northdan Soft is a software vendor. We do not run courses, we are not an accredited training provider and we cannot be a partner on the training component of such a project — if that is what you are looking for, the right address is an authorised provider and we have nothing to sell you.

What we build is the part on which the skill is later applied: internal applications, management systems, automations, integrations between existing systems, plus the accompanying technical documentation. Training users on the solution we deliver belongs to the implementation project and is budgeted as such, separately from a publicly funded training project.

What we do not do, stated once even on an archive page: we do not write funding applications, we do not assess the eligibility of your company and we do not promise approvals. The dossier stays with you or with the consultant you work with.