The Ministry of Employment, Business, and Self-Employment allocated €220.7 million last year to finance actions in the field of professional training for employment, representing a 163% increase compared to 2018, the last year before the change of government in Andalusia. This investment more than doubles the €83.7 million executed six years ago and nearly multiplies by nine the €26.5 million recorded a decade ago, at the end of 2015.
The data was provided in the Andalusian Parliament by the counselor, Rocío Blanco, who detailed that the number of beneficiaries of the various programs promoted by her department in just the last 15 months (2024 exercise and early this year) total 32,730, more than double the participants in the entire 2015-2018 period, which barely reached 13,083.
The number of completed training actions has also set a historical record with 2,525 since January 2024, 115% more than those carried out throughout 2023 and improving by 131% compared to the 1,093 initiated between 2015 and 2018. In that quadrennium, only an average of 273 per year was convened, almost a tenth of those accumulated last year.
During her speech in the Chamber, Blanco defended the value of vocational training for employment as «a key tool to provide workers with the necessary skills to fully develop, as well as to take advantage of the employment opportunities offered by the labor market through their professional progress.»
That is the main objective, emphasized the counselor, of the catalog of actions deployed by the Ministry of Employment to «offer opportunities» to workers and unemployed individuals, especially «to those groups facing greater difficulties in labor insertion.» Among them, she mentioned the Employment and Training program, which last year financed 509 projects of public entities worth €83.6 million, with 3,048 students participating.
This program, continuing this year thanks to a new call for €71 million, will have a new variant in 2025. Endowed with €30 million, the Employment and Training in Companies line will seek to improve the labor market integration of up to 1,875 students, combining knowledge acquisition with remunerated activity.
The counselor also highlighted the €57.1 million that allowed 29,115 unemployed individuals to participate in some of the nearly 2,000 training actions organized in collaboration with 217 private entities. This amount adds to the €17.3 million that supported 822 projects not leading to professional certificates. Projects aimed at unemployed and employed individuals, both leading to professional certificates and non-leading specialties, will amount to €44 million this year.
Among the other actions, there is the call last year for €44.4 million in subsidies aimed at financing professional requalification actions (reskilling and upskilling) in strategic sectors. Also, programs linked to the use of new technologies, such as training in 5G and SAP, or the Prepared program, which since its launch in 2023 has brought nearly 60,000 women from rural areas closer to digital environments and will continue to develop until 2026 with the aim of reaching 85,000 beneficiaries.
Unique Projects
Blanco also reiterated the strong commitment of the Ministry of Employment to the design of unique projects that meet specific needs of companies in emerging sectors or facing greater obstacles in finding professional profiles. Examples of this are the training actions linked to the naval sector of the Bay of Cadiz, which has already received participation requests amounting to €577,000, or the imminent call this year for a training plan for the aerospace sector of Seville and Cadiz, with an allocation of over €8 million.
Likewise, Employment is finalizing the call for €5.5 million for training actions that will meet the high demand for workers in projects linked to the emerging green hydrogen sector in Andalusia, or the program that will mobilize up to €11.6 million to provide qualified personnel to the Army Land Logistics Base in Cordoba.
Finally, among the new programs that the Ministry of Employment is finalizing is the one aimed at self-employed workers, who will for the first time have a specific teletraining action available for up to 4,760 entrepreneurs.