EDEC Trans'Formation: the sector-wide scheme that funds French training organisations

When looking for funding for a training organisation, the reflex is almost always the same: the OPCO’s skills development plan, to train your own employees. There is, however, a second, lesser-known lever aimed specifically at the training organisations’ sector itself: the EDEC Trans’Formation, signed between the State, the sector’s professional bodies and AKTO. Here is what this scheme actually funds, and how an organisation can access it.

What is an EDEC?

An engagement de développement de l’emploi et des compétences (EDEC) is an annual or multi-year agreement between the French State and one or more sector-wide or cross-sector professional organisations. It allows the State, at national and regional level alike, to provide technical and financial support to these organisations so they can anticipate changes in jobs and qualifications, thereby securing the career paths of workers in the sector.

In practice, an EDEC does not directly fund a single, isolated training action the way an OPCO’s skills development plan would. It funds collective engineering work: sector diagnostics, shared HR tools, experiments, and communication campaigns on the sector’s professions — carried by the sector itself, with the technical support of its skills operator.

Trans’Formation: the EDEC signed for the training organisations’ sector

On 11 April 2024, the State (Ministry of Labour), the professional organisations of the training organisations’ sector (IDCC 1516) and OPCO AKTO signed the framework agreement “Trans’formation, innovating to train better at the heart of the regions.” This EDEC runs for three years, from 4 September 2023 to 3 September 2026, and covers the sector’s full scope: roughly 10,560 companies and 113,000 employees.

For a newly declared organisation, this is worth noting alongside your sector collective agreement: as soon as your main activity is training and you employ at least one person covered by IDCC 1516, your company falls within the population targeted by this agreement — even though, in practice, it is mostly collective projects and sector-wide actions that benefit directly, rarely a single stand-alone organisation.

Four focus areas

The framework agreement structures its actions around four axes:

1. Supporting the CSR transformation of training organisations — working conditions, and the sector’s environmental and social challenges;
2. Securing career paths and strengthening HR practices at sector companies, particularly the smallest ones that have no dedicated HR function;
3. Boosting the attractiveness of training professions, by designing tools that promote the sector’s jobs;
4. Launching regional experiments, to meet each region’s specific training needs and help companies anticipate tomorrow’s skills.

Shared funding, with a dedicated regional strand

The EDEC Trans’Formation mobilises a budget shared between the sector (€650,000), the DGEFP (€420,000) and AKTO (€350,000), for a total of nearly €1.42 million. Of that amount, €900,000 is earmarked for the regional experiments under axis 4, steered by regional technical committees run by AKTO, under the supervision of a national steering committee.

How a training organisation can actually access it

There are two distinct entry points, not to be confused:

• The regional experiments under axis 4, which fund projects carried by a collective of training organisations from the same region, addressing an identified regional need (shared engineering, digital transformation, support for the development of distance training). These projects are selected by the regional technical committees: the entry point is your AKTO adviser or the regional webinars presenting the EDEC.
• The HR diagnostic offered by AKTO, which is not specific to this EDEC but serves the same goals of securing career paths and strengthening HR practices: this pre-diagnostic is fully covered by AKTO and open to companies of any size; if it reveals a need for deeper support, HR consulting delivered by an expert consultant, co-funded by the State and AKTO, is open to companies with fewer than 250 employees.

An individual organisation therefore has no application to file on its own to “tap into” the EDEC: access is built by approaching AKTO, attending presentation webinars, or joining a regional collective.

An opportunity not to be mistaken for direct funding

The most common pitfall is to mistake this EDEC for a direct subsidy window for your own organisation. That is not its purpose: an EDEC funds collective dynamics and shared tools for the sector, not the day-to-day running costs of a single company. A landmark Cedefop study — the European agency for the development of vocational training — covering sectoral training funds in eight European countries including France (Hefler, Sectoral training funds in Europe), finds that funds managed by social partners do improve the quantity and quality of sectoral training provision — but that the administrative complexity of accessing them often discourages the smallest organisations from applying. Better to anticipate that reality: identify your AKTO adviser early and follow sector communications, rather than discovering the scheme after a regional call for projects has closed.

The link with your Qualiopi monitoring obligations

This work of anticipating jobs and skills is not just a funding opportunity: it overlaps with an obligation the quality standard already imposes on your organisation. Indicator 24 on monitoring professions and skills — one of the three monitoring duties covered in our article on Qualiopi monitoring obligations — expects you to demonstrate active tracking of changes in your sector. The diagnostics, tools and publications produced under the EDEC Trans’Formation are direct, ready-to-use evidence for documenting this monitoring at audit, especially for organisations that struggle to formalise this activity day to day.

A study by Dominique Baruel Bencherqui, Alice Le Flanchec and Astrid Mullenbach, published in 2011 in the journal Management & Avenir and devoted to the effects of workforce and skills planning on employee employability, shows that skills-anticipation efforts carried out collectively — at sector or group-of-companies level — produce measurable effects on employee employability, greater than efforts run company by company in isolation. That is precisely the logic Trans’Formation seeks to activate across the training organisations’ sector.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Waiting for an individual subsidy that will never come: the EDEC funds collective projects and sector-wide tools, not a single organisation’s operating budget.
• Ignoring AKTO’s webinars and communications, the only genuinely effective channel for learning about regional calls for projects and their deadlines.
• Confusing AKTO’s free HR diagnostic, open to companies of any size, with the co-funded HR consulting, reserved for organisations with fewer than 250 employees.
• Not documenting work produced under the EDEC in your Qualiopi monitoring system, even though it is directly usable evidence for indicator 24.
• Launching a regional experiment alone: these projects must be carried by a collective of organisations, not a single, isolated structure.

Take action

Documenting your monitoring of professions and skills, formalising your HR practices, and preparing your evidence file: the Complete Kit Certif at €297 (14-day guarantee) provides the templates expected for all 32 indicators of the quality standard, including the monitoring evidence for indicator 24. If you are launching your organisation and want to structure your HR and financial strategy from day one, the ebook “Create your training organisation in 30 days” at €67 guides you step by step, and the full pack at €347 combines both resources.