A training grand bargain for Spain: personal learning accounts that follow the worker

Matthew Miller's rule for a grand bargain is simple. The left accepts market-friendly tools in place of a bigger traditional programme, and the right puts up money equal to the size of the problem. Spain has a problem that fits that rule almost perfectly: adult training. The money is already there, much of it goes unspent, and the people who need training most are the least likely to get it.

What Spain has now

Most job-related training in Spain runs through FUNDAE, the state foundation for training in employment. Each firm receives a training credit worked out as a share of the vocational training contribution it paid the previous year, with a higher share for smaller firms, and it recovers the cost of courses through deductions from its Social Security payments.

FUNDAE's 2025 report shows a system that is large and thin. Firm-organised training reached 6,124,445 participants in courses run by 348,443 companies, a record. Those courses added up to 80 million hours, an average of 13.1 hours per participant. Measured against the whole private-sector workforce, 23% of employees received training organised by their employer.

The money tells the same story. Firms drew €674.3 million of their training credit in 2025, which is 52% of the credit assigned. So roughly €620 million of training money assigned to firms in a single year went unused. Firms with 10 to 49 workers used the smallest share of what they had.

The individual route is tiny. Spain has a paid individual training leave, which lets a worker take a course of their own choosing during working hours. In 2025, 6,899 such leaves were completed, averaging 77.1 hours each. That is a good course length, available to a handful of people in an economy that ended 2025 with 21,844,414 workers registered with Social Security.

The labour market these workers move through has changed. Presenting the end-of-2025 figures, the minister for Social Security said nine in ten registered workers now hold open-ended contracts; before the 2021 labour reform, three in ten people in work were on temporary contracts. More stable contracts are good news. They also mean that a worker's next career move is more likely to be a voluntary change of job or sector, and a training right tied to the current employer serves that worker badly.

What Europe recommends

The EU has already designed the alternative. On 16 June 2022 employment ministers adopted a Council recommendation on individual learning accounts. The Commission describes the aim as giving everyone access to quality training throughout working life, whether currently employed or not. Each working-age adult accumulates and keeps training entitlements over time and spends them, at their own initiative, on quality-assured training, guidance or validation of skills. The recommendation asks countries to support the accounts with a national registry of eligible training and with paid training leave for employees.

France runs the best-known version. Its Compte personnel de formation credits €500 a year to anyone working at least half-time, up to a ceiling of €5,000. Workers without a basic vocational qualification get €800 a year, up to €8,000. Most training also requires a personal contribution of €150, indexed to inflation each January, which the employer can cover.

The proposal

Spain should create a cuenta personal de formación for every adult of working age: employees, the self-employed and the unemployed alike, opened automatically and visible in the person's Social Security file.

Each year the account receives a credit, set at €400 a year up to €4,000, and at €700 a year up to €7,000 for workers without post-compulsory qualifications. Unused credit stays with the person when they change job, become self-employed or lose their job. The credit is an entitlement, paid only when used, so its cost follows take-up.

The account is spent on any course in a public registry of approved training, from vocational certificates to university modules and validation of skills already learned on the job. Every provider in the registry publishes, course by course, completion rates and the employment and earnings of its former students a year later, drawn from Social Security records. Providers that fail a minimum standard leave the registry.

Workers get the right to paid training leave to use the account, building on the individual training leave that already exists, with the cost of their wages during the leave shared between the account and the firm's training credit.

The financing starts with what is already there. The share of firms' training credit that goes unspent each year, about €620 million in 2025, is moved into the accounts. Firms keep the credit they use for their own training, and smaller firms keep their higher rates.

Why both sides should sign

This is a grand bargain in Miller's sense. The left gets money at the scale of the problem, larger credits for the least qualified and a real right to paid time off to learn. The right gets money that follows the person, open competition among public, private and social providers, and training judged by results that anyone can read.

The idea that fits neither tradition holds the package together. A training right that belongs to the worker and travels across contracts, firms and spells of unemployment treats skills as part of a person's citizenship in the labour market, and published results make that right worth having. Spain already pays for training. Putting the unused half of that money in workers' own hands, with honest information about what each course delivers, is the bargain both sides can win.