Most companies looking for money to train their people know two routes: Poland’s National Training Fund (KFS), administered by district labour offices, and regional co-financing through the Development Services Database (BUR). There is a third, markedly less familiar one — sectoral programmes financed from the European Social Fund Plus, in which a single operator serves the whole of Poland rather than one region. For companies in IT, telecommunications and cybersecurity, that means funding for which the company’s registered address is irrelevant.
In brief
What this article covers:
- How the sectoral programme differs from KFS and from regional co-financing
- Who qualifies — and why an “IT” business activity code need not be the primary one
- How large the refund is and how the per-employee cap works
- How the three forms of own contribution differ, and when one of them is unavailable
- How a call round works and what must be ready before it opens
Who this is for: HR and L&D teams in technology companies, owners and boards of ICT small and mid-sized firms, anyone responsible for a development budget.
Reading time: 8 minutes
Three funding routes compared
| Dimension | Sectoral programme | KFS | Regional co-financing (BUR) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who distributes the money | Operator selected by PARP, nationwide reach | District labour offices | Regional operators |
| What governs access | Belonging to the sector | Alignment with a ministerial priority | Company’s registered region |
| Payment mechanism | Refund after the training is delivered | Funds transferred up front once the agreement is signed | Depends on the operator |
| Where the training is bought | Exclusively in the Development Services Database | Any provider listed in BUR | Exclusively in BUR |
| Thematic scope | Sector council recommendations | Priorities set for the given year | Depends on the operator |
The most consequential practical difference is cash flow. Under the sectoral programme the company pays the invoice in full and only then applies for reimbursement, so it must have the cash available and accept a delay. KFS works the other way round: the money reaches the company’s account after the agreement with the labour office is signed, before the training takes place.
Who can take part
The project run by the Lower Silesian Regional Development Agency for the IT, telecommunications and cybersecurity sector is open to companies throughout Poland, from micro-enterprises to large firms, with the proviso that employees of large enterprises may not make up more than 40% of all participants in the project. The delivery period runs from January 2026 to December 2029 (project site, as at 4 November 2026).
Two points surprise applicants most often:
The business activity code need not be the primary one. The operator states explicitly that where sector membership is verified by means of a PKD code, that code is not required to be the company’s main one. This matters, because in many other calls a secondary code triggers an additional declaration about its share of revenue. No such condition is imposed here — but the list of qualifying codes is updated from time to time and appears in two different versions across the operator’s own materials, so the codes should be confirmed directly on the project site rather than taken from an older announcement.
You need not be an IT company. Alongside ICT firms, the project admits so-called Group 0 — companies operating in sectors for which no sectoral competence council has been established. The difference lies in the scope of eligible training: sector companies draw on both the sectoral council’s and the Programme Council’s recommendations, whereas Group 0 companies may use only the Programme Council’s.
Sector membership can also be demonstrated without a PKD code, through documents evidencing the actual area of activity or key roles — the operator gives invoices and contracts as examples.
How much can be recovered
The refund reaches 80% of the cost of a development service, and the maximum price of services attributable to a single employee is PLN 11,715. The minimum own contribution is 20%. One employee may use more than one service, provided the individual cap is respected.
Used in full for ten people, that is over PLN 117,000 of training value, of which the company recovers up to 80%. These are sums at which a development budget is worth recalculating from scratch.
Three forms of own contribution — and one trap
The own contribution may be made as a payment, as the remuneration of employees released to attend the training, or as a mix of the two.
The remuneration route is the less obvious one and the more favourable financially. The logic runs as follows: for the duration of the training the employee is not performing their usual work yet still receives normal pay; the company genuinely bears that payroll cost and may count it as its contribution. In exchange it recovers a larger share of the invoice.
The trap lies in the boundary conditions. The operator stipulates that for self-employed participants and for training delivered outside participants’ working hours, the own contribution may be made only as a payment. In other words, scheduling a course for a Saturday or after hours automatically closes off the remuneration route. The timing of a training is therefore a financial decision, not merely a logistical one.
Settling a contribution in remuneration also takes more documents and more time: it requires payroll records for the month of the training together with confirmation of the related public-law settlements, which only come into existence in subsequent months. A company that needs its money back quickly often chooses the simpler payment variant deliberately.
How a call round works
Recruitment is not continuous; the operator opens rounds. Round 1 ran from 14 to 21 September 2026, with the ranking list published on 22 October 2026. Round 2 has been announced for the period from 13 November 2026 at 08:00 to 20 November 2026 at 11:59:59, with an allocation of PLN 1,000,000; in this round no cap was set on the number of employees a single entrepreneur may submit (operator’s announcement of 29 October 2026).
Two features of this schedule decide the outcome:
- A round may close early. The operator reserves automatic closure of the call the moment the allocation set aside for that round is exhausted. The stated end date is a maximum, not a guarantee.
- The system opens before the call does. For round 2 the operator makes the system available five days ahead of the start so that documents can be prepared; submission itself unlocks only on the opening day.
The conclusion about preparation is straightforward: a company’s full set of documents should be ready before the call date is announced, not assembled after it. Gathering corporate data, registration documents and employee details usually takes longer than the window left between the announcement and the opening of the round.
What qualifies, and what does not
The training must be bought through the Development Services Database, flagged with the “co-financing available” option, and its scope must match the recommendations of the Programme Council for competences or of the sectoral competence council. Among the example areas the operator lists artificial intelligence (including the use of AI in programming, testing and cybersecurity), cybersecurity management at specialist, expert and managerial level, LAN/WAN network administration, programming, software testing, fibre-optic networks, cloud solutions, big data analysis, and also soft skills: project management, team communication and coping with stress.
Three limits are worth knowing before the delivery format is settled:
- E-learning is excluded. Services may be delivered only on site or remotely in real time.
- Attendance below 80% voids the refund. If a participant misses more than a fifth of the sessions, the cost of their participation ceases to be eligible.
- Rating the service in BUR is an obligation, not a courtesy to the provider — it forms part of the settlement.
The most common mistakes
Four recurring errors emerge from practice. The first is assembling documents only once a call has been announced; with a window measured in days, that is usually too late. The second is scheduling training outside working hours while assuming that remuneration will cover the own contribution — those two decisions are mutually exclusive. The third is choosing a course outside the council’s recommendations; the subject must fall within them, however real and well argued the company’s need may be. The fourth is skipping the service rating in BUR after delivery, which blocks payment at the final step.
It is also worth designating a single owner of the process inside the company. The application, the agreement, employee documentation, the invoice, attendance records and the settlement form a chain in which one broken link costs the entire refund — and splitting that responsibility across several people without a clear owner is the most common cause of missed deadlines.
All figures and dates in this article come from the project operator’s documentation and reflect the position as at 4 November 2026. The terms of subsequent rounds, their allocations and caps may differ — check the current rules on the project site before applying.