eFundae - Spain
In today’s rapidly evolving labour market, the ability to adapt skills and embrace digital transformation has become indispensable. Spain has placed lifelong learning at the heart of its strategy to strengthen employability, competitiveness, and social inclusion. Within this framework, the State Foundation for Training for Employment (FUNDAE) plays a pivotal role in ensuring that workers and companies can respond to emerging challenges. The launch of eFundae, a free online platform for training, represents a major step in making quality learning accessible to all, particularly in areas where digital divides remain a pressing concern.
Background and Context
FUNDAE’s work is anchored in the Spanish training-for-employment system, which draws its resources from Social Security contributions complemented by State and European Social Fund financing. This system has long supported companies and employees in upgrading skills to anticipate shifts in labour demand, and has increasingly turned towards digitalisation as a key priority. eFundae builds on this national infrastructure while reflecting broader European calls for stronger digital skills and more inclusive lifelong learning opportunities. It sits alongside other FUNDAE initiatives, such as Digitalízate+, which brings together free learning resources from major companies under public-private collaboration agreements with the Spanish Public Employment Service (SEPE). By weaving together public coordination and private expertise, these initiatives have created an ecosystem where training is both widely available and closely aligned with labour-market needs.
About eFundae
The eFundae platform offers a wide catalogue of online courses designed to strengthen professional competences and to open up learning opportunities beyond traditional settings. Its content includes innovation and technology, transversal skills, entrepreneurship, business management, and sustainability. Courses cover topics such as programming, data analysis, content creation, cybersecurity, or strategies for environmentally sustainable business, all designed to meet the needs of both companies and individual learners. Accessibility is central to its design: anyone, whether an employee, a jobseeker, a student, or an entrepreneur, can freely enrol and benefit. The platform is also complemented by targeted programmes such as Autónomo 5.0, which helps self-employed workers improve competitiveness through training in areas like e-invoicing, digital marketing, and information security. Together, these elements reflect eFundae’s role as a practical tool to support Spain’s workforce in an increasingly digital economy.
Why is this a good practice?
eFundae stands out as it combines scale, inclusiveness, and innovation in ways that few national initiatives manage to achieve. At any given time, the broader training-for-employment system supports tens of thousands of courses across hundreds of thousands of companies, illustrating the reach of the infrastructure into which eFundae is embedded. Under the Digitalízate+ programme alone, more than fifty collaboration agreements have produced over a thousand freely accessible training resources, which by 2024 had attracted nearly eight million visitors, with corporate partners such as Amazon Web Services receiving recognition for their role in expanding digital skills. By offering courses free of charge, and ensuring that access is open to all categories of learners, eFundae reduces structural barriers and promotes equitable participation in professional training. Its focus on digital competences ensures that citizens are not left behind in a world where online tools and knowledge are indispensable, while its funding model, based on stable contributions and European support, guarantees sustainability. Remarkably, the model is replicable: the combination of national coordination, open platforms, and public-private collaboration provides a template that can inspire similar efforts in other countries. For these reasons, eFundae represents a strong example of how training systems can evolve to meet the twin challenges of digital transformation and social inclusion.
