The personal training account, instructions for use

To open it, as 12 million people have done since its creation in 2015, all you have to do is go, with your Social Security number and email address, to the site moncompteformation.gouv.fr or, since November 21, 2019, on the application of the same name.

Once your account is activated, you discover the amount you have, 1.280 euros on average in November 2020 for a private employee.

The application then allows you to consult a catalog of 320.000 training courses.

From the first page are presented the jobs that recruit the most as a caregiver, IT project manager or truck driver. Then you just have to type in the desired training sector and its city to obtain training close to home. The selection appears, sorted in a random fashion.

All training courses certifying and carried out by an organization registered with the Ministry of Labor are eligible.

The most requested are the B permit, help in setting up a business, the skills assessment, the Tosa (certification of computer and digital skills) and the Toeic (English level).

Once clicked to book a training, the organization has 48 hours to respond and confirm. To get help, employees can use a Professional Development Council (CEP) free of charge.

How is the CPF supplied?

The terms of acquisition of rights differ according to professional status.

For a qualified half-time employee or more, the account is funded up to 500 euros per year up to the limit of 5.000 euros. Below half-time, the rights are calculated in proportion to the activity. Unskilled employees benefit from 800 euros per year, up to a limit of 8.000 euros.

Until 2019, the CPF was supplied in hours, i.e. 24 hours a year for full time. The conversion of hours into euros was carried out in November 2019, on the basis of 15 euros per hour.

Since the beginning of September, companies can top up the CPF account of their employees. For the moment, we are at 5 million euros of staffing for 2.000 employees, a figure that should increase after confinement.

Since July, Pôle emploi can do the same with the CPF for job seekers. 18.000 people with a training project benefited from it, for a total of 31 million euros.

For non-employees, the rights will be calculated in 2020 in proportion to the activities declared in 2018 and 2019. For civil servants, the supply is still done in hours.

How to transfer your DIF hours to the CPF?

In 2015, the CPF replaced the DIF (individual right to training), which was supplied at the rate of 20 hours per year and capped at 120 hours.

Employees had until December 31, 2020 to switch the DIF hours (converted into euros, at the rate of 15 euros per hour, or a maximum of 1.800 euros) on their CPF.

Noting "that one in four employees" only carried out this operation, the Minister of Labor Elisabeth Borne has just pushed back this deadline to June 30.

The employee must recover his balance of DIF hours on his payslip for December 2014 or January, or request a certificate from his then employer, and enter it in his CPF account.

3 question to Michel Yahiel director of pensions and solidarity at the Caisse des Dépôts

A year ago, the government launched with great fanfare the application "MonCompteFormation", a "revolution" supposed to take off vocational training by allowing everyone to register directly for a session, without an intermediary.

For Michel Yahiel, director of pensions and solidarity at the Caisse des Dépôts, which manages the personal training account (CPF) of millions of French people, "the bet of autonomy" in the choice of training "is verified" and the application, downloaded 1,88 million times, makes it possible to "reach a more diverse audience".

Q: After a year, has the app found its audience? Did she resist the crisis and the confinement?

A: In one year, we funded around a million training sessions for nearly a billion euros. This is above the planned schedule, the rate of training purchases is twice as high as it was before the launch of the application.
We mainly have qualitative reasons for satisfaction. We have more women, non-executives and seniors who are being trained whereas before the typical profile was rather a young male executive.
The average level of training is increasing, we are no longer in the overwhelming domination of modern languages.
The market becomes more transparent, over time the average prices of certain training courses fall because of competition. The system was robust during the Covid because we managed to keep the heads above water for a number of training organizations that had cash flow difficulties by paying them at eight days and we helped them to mutate into distancing. On leaving confinement, we returned to the previous rhythm and we did not measure a drop in activity in the new confinement, on the contrary.

Q: The application is based on the user's autonomy in his training choices. This worried both employers, who feared losing control over the training of their employees, and unions, who worried about a lack of support. Are these doubts removed?

A: These doubts were well founded and seem to me to have been largely overcome. Since the beginning of September, employers have been able to top up their employees' accounts and are therefore stakeholders of their choice. It relaxed the atmosphere considerably.
There is a sort of deal: you direct the training of the employee in a direction that suits you, he simply has to agree. And if he agrees, he invests for example 50% of the sum via his CPF and you finance the rest.
The fear of employees cut off from digital obsessed us a little more.
Pôle emploi has done an enormous amount of work with job seekers to support them. It would have been a shame if the people furthest from employment were those who use the CPF the least, this is not the case.
The Professional Development Council was slipping a bit, it has been considerably strengthened and is offered free of charge to employees on the application.
The philosophy of the reform was "are people sufficiently autonomous to have an idea of ​​their project, to identify it, to deduce from it the necessary training, to choose this training, to pay for it and to evaluate it?" The bet was rather yes, it is verified.

Q: What are the next evolutions of the application?

A: At the beginning of 2021, we will have a rating of the training sessions based on the opinions of those who have followed them, we waited until we had volume for this to have statistical significance.
In 2021, for each user of the CPF, we will generate a skills passport, including the training courses funded by the CPF but also the diplomas provided by the National Education. This will attest to an initial and professional course which can be useful in the search for a job.
The advantage of the CPF tool is that the State, the regions (which will be able to abound in December), the branches, the companies can use it to orient a training policy on an employment area, industrial reconversion, etc.
In the recovery plan, the CPF will be mobilized for the training of young school dropouts in digital technology as well as for training in shortage jobs. This will be financed by the State but will go through the CPF, as a vector for priority actions.