When public funding for workplace training comes up, the term that gets used is almost always Qualifizierungsgeld. That is Section 82a SGB III, and it requires structural-change-driven qualification needs affecting at least 20 percent of the workforce. The provision that applies far more often in everyday practice sits next to it and is called Section 82 SGB III. It has no twenty percent threshold, but it has several others, and they are very concrete.
The conditions on the individual case
Three requirements concern the measure and the person, not the establishment:
- The measure must last more than 120 hours.
- The last vocational qualification obtained, or the last funded qualification, should as a rule lie at least two years back.
- No correspondingly funded training may have taken place in the last two years.
The 120 hour limit is the one that most often fails in practice, and it reaches back into planning. A three day course does not clear it. A learning path that combines several programmes into one route to a target role can clear it, provided it is designed as a single measure rather than a loose sequence of short components. That is a design decision taken before booking, not after.
The scale by establishment size
The second block concerns the establishment. The statute scales both the share of course costs the employer carries and the wage subsidy, and the two scales run in opposite directions:
| Employees in the establishment | Employer share of course costs | Wage subsidy |
|---|---|---|
| under 50 | no share | 75 percent |
| 50 to 499 | 50 percent | 50 percent |
| 500 and above | 75 percent | 25 percent |
For establishments under 500 employees the employer share is waived where the employee has reached the age of 45 or is severely disabled.
So anyone converting a plant with several thousand employees lands in the bottom row: three quarters of the course costs stay in-house, and the wage subsidy is a quarter. That is not a side effect of size but the express logic of the provision. Larger establishments are meant to carry the bulk themselves.
The point almost nobody connects to codetermination
And then there is a rule that most summaries lose: the employer share of course costs falls by five percentage points where a works agreement or a collective agreement on vocational training applies in the establishment.
Five percentage points sounds small until you apply it to an initiative with several hundred participants. More interesting than the magnitude, though, is what it hangs on. The instrument that lowers the share is exactly the instrument codetermination requires anyway.
Under Section 97(2) BetrVG the works council codetermines the introduction of workplace vocational training measures as soon as employer measures change employees' work such that their occupational knowledge no longer suffices. That is the standard case of a transformation initiative. The works agreement that comes out of that codetermination procedure is therefore not only the legal basis for the qualification wave, it also lowers its cost.
Treating codetermination as a delay to be served as late as possible gives this connection away twice: once on the timeline and once on the employer share.
How this differs from Section 82a SGB III
The two provisions sit side by side and answer different questions. Section 82 funds training for employees within an ongoing employment relationship under the conditions above. Section 82a concerns Qualifizierungsgeld, a wage replacement benefit during training within an existing employment relationship, and requires structural-change-driven qualification needs affecting at least 20 percent of the workforce, or at least 10 percent in establishments under 250 employees. There too the measure must exceed 120 hours, and the conditions must be documented in a works agreement or a collective agreement.
That twenty percent threshold is why Section 82a does not apply in many initiatives while Section 82 does. A conversion touching four role clusters across two units can well set off a substantial qualification wave without reaching a fifth of the total workforce.
What we expressly do not do here
This piece sets out what the provisions contain. It is not funding advice. QualiShift does not assess eligibility, does not file applications, and evaluates neither entitlements nor amounts. Whether a particular measure is funded in a particular case is decided by the Federal Employment Agency, and advice on that belongs with them or with a body qualified to give it.
The reason the thresholds appear here anyway: they shape how a qualification wave is designed, and that design happens long before any application. Whether a learning path is built as one measure of more than 120 hours or as five short ones, whether a works agreement is concluded early or late, these are planning decisions, not funding-procedure decisions.
Sources
- Section 82 SGB III, funding of vocational training for employed persons.
- Section 82a SGB III, Qualifizierungsgeld, in force since 1 April 2024.
- Section 97(2) Betriebsverfassungsgesetz.