Kairos France Travail: the portal every provider training jobseekers must master

If you train jobseekers in France, part of your administrative obligations happens neither in your management software nor on EDOF, but on Kairos, the application France Travail provides to training organisations. AIF quotes, training-entry attestation, attendance, exits: Kairos is the official channel — and the punctuality of your entries directly conditions your trainees’ pay. Here is how the portal works and what you must do on it, step by step.

What exactly is Kairos?

Kairos is the web interface between training organisations and France Travail (formerly Pôle emploi). It gathers the procedures related to jobseekers in training: submission and tracking of AIF quotes (individual training aid) and POEI, the training-entry attestation, the declaration of attendance (absences, interruptions) and of the exit. The underlying obligation: since the law of 5 March 2014, organisations must declare jobseekers’ entries into training — Kairos is its digital channel.

Access is obtained from France Travail upon presentation of your administrative details (SIRET, training activity number); an administrator account is created for the organisation, which then manages its team’s access rights. The official guides and application news are published on actuformation.francetravail.org — a source to add to your regulatory watch.

The AIF quote: where everything starts

For a course funded by the individual training aid (AIF), the circuit goes through Kairos: the jobseeker builds their project with their adviser, and you submit the quote via the application. Treat it like a standard training quote: precise title, objectives, duration, dates, delivery mode and a price consistent with your catalogue — advisers compare, and a quote inconsistent with your public pages or EDOF loses the case. The funding decision is notified to you in Kairos; never start the course before approval, as an early start is not covered.

The entry attestation: the action never to postpone

From the first day of the course, you must attest in Kairos to the trainee’s actual presence (training-entry attestation). This entry triggers the update of the jobseeker’s file and their switch to the status of trainee of professional training — hence their allowance (AREF, or training pay where applicable) and their social coverage. An attestation filed a week late potentially means pay delayed by as much: for an audience often under financial strain, that is the leading cause of administrative drop-out. Make this entry a day-one ritual, just as the attendance sheet and the convocation were beforehand.

Attendance and exits: the ongoing declaration

During the course, you declare absences and interruptions in Kairos: they affect the trainee’s pay and must match your attendance sheets exactly or, for distance learning, your FOAD attendance evidence. At the end of the programme, the exit declaration (actual date, reason — completion, drop-out, termination) closes the file. These data must remain consistent with your completion certificates: in a service-delivery check, gaps between Kairos, attendance sheets and invoicing are the first points examined.

Why such rigour: training jobseekers is an investment that pays off over time

This formalism is not gratuitous: it underpins a scheme whose effectiveness is documented — provided it is well executed. The meta-analysis by Card, Kluve and Weber published in 2018 in the Journal of the European Economic Association, covering more than 200 evaluations of active labour-market policies, shows that training programmes for jobseekers have weak short-term effects but significantly positive effects on employment two to three years after the training — among the best results of the active policies studied (study on Google Scholar). For the provider, the consequence is concrete: funders steer these schemes over the long run, demand reliable data — and organisations whose declarations are clean and punctual naturally become the prescribers’ preferred partners.

Kairos, EDOF, OPCO: do not mix up the counters

Kairos handles the France Travail relationship; it replaces neither EDOF (the CPF portal, with its own invoicing rules and payment lead times), nor the OPCO platforms, nor your annual BPF. The same trainee can fall under several channels (a CPF topped up by France Travail, for instance): map, for each scheme, who declares what, where and when — typically a one-page procedure to add to your quality system, and useful evidence for indicator 23 (legal watch).

Take action

Kairos does not forgive improvisation: every entry must rest on solid internal documents — convocations, attendance sheets, completion certificates, monitoring procedures. The Complete Kit Certif (€297, 14-day guarantee, documents in French) provides all these templates aligned with the 32 indicators, and the ebook Créer son organisme de formation en 30 jours (€67) — or the complete pack at €347 — guides you through opening every funder channel.