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2027 training plan: essentials, key deadlines and the maintenance budget
An annual training plan that only budgets for new content goes stale halfway through the year, because nobody reserved capacity to update what already exists.
In 2025, the most recent financial year with complete closed data, Spanish companies drew down 674.3 million euros of an assigned training credit of 1,301.6 million. That's 51.8%.¹ Almost half the money those companies had already paid in to train their people expired unused.
That doesn't happen for lack of interest. It happens because the training plan gets written in November, approved in December and opened twice more all year. By March, half the company has changed procedures, tools or structure, and the plan still says what it said.
We're going to look at how to build a 2027 plan that survives twelve months: which budget line the average plan is missing, how to organize it around the full knowledge cycle, and which dates actually constrain the calendar.
Take any annual training plan and look at its line items. They're almost always new actions: the leadership track, the product training for the May launch, the safety refresher, the course for the tool going live in January.
What rarely appears is a line for keeping current whatever is already recorded, written or uploaded to the LMS. And that's the work that eats the most hours once the library passes a certain size.
The effect is cumulative and quiet. Every year the catalogue grows, every year a percentage of what it holds ages, and because maintenance has no budget assigned, it gets done with whatever hours are left over, and on a team of one to three people there are none. After three financial years, part of the content teaches a version of the process that no longer applies, and nobody knows exactly which part.
A plan that reserves no capacity for this isn't a twelve-month plan. It's a four-month plan with a wish list behind it.
The alternative isn't planning more courses. It's changing the unit of planning: instead of a catalogue of actions, a system that covers the Knowledge Lifecycle, the four stages everything the organization needs its people to know passes through.
Ordering the plan by stage rather than by topic forces you to budget for all four, not just the first.
Turning what the organization knows (procedures, criteria, the expertise living in three people's heads) into structured material. It's the stage everyone budgets for and the most visible one.
What the plan has to separate out: of everything we're going to create in 2027, how much is genuinely new and how much is redoing something that already existed and went stale. It's rarely the ratio people assume.
Getting it to the right person at the moment it's useful. This is where the difference gets decided between training that's consumed and training that's assigned and ignored.
The split to decide: how much of 2027's training is triggered by an event (a new hire, a role change, a procedure update) and how much by the calendar. The second is what generates most of the pointless completions.
Checking that the person can apply what they learned, not just that they finished the module. It's the stage almost no plan funds, and the one that holds up any serious conversation about impact.
The uncomfortable question: of all the planned actions, for how many will we be able to demonstrate the result with something more than a completion rate?
Spotting which content has stopped being valid and redoing it before it trains someone on expired information. It's the invisible stage, and the one that turns a catalogue into a system.
What has to be written down: who reviews what, how often, and against which budget line. And answering that requires knowing which version of each piece of content each person has, because without that the review is done by guesswork.
A budget ordered by stage reads differently from one ordered by topic, and exposes the gaps immediately.
| Line item | What it covers | What happens if it's not funded |
|---|---|---|
| Creation | New content: launches, new regulation, tracks that don't exist yet | It gets covered by emergencies and external production at emergency prices |
| Distribution | Setting up tracks, assignment automation, integration with the HR system | Training is assigned by hand and depends on someone remembering |
| Verification | Designing the application checks, time from the supervisors who observe and validate | All you can report is how many people finished, which isn't what leadership asked |
| Update | Periodic review of the catalogue and redoing what has expired | Content ages without anyone noticing until something fails |
The update line is usually the one missing entirely.
Until you have your own history to refine it, a reasonable starting point is to reserve around a third of the year's production capacity for redoing content that already exists.
Treat that number as a hypothesis the first year confirms or corrects, not as an industry standard: no published figure exists, and the real one depends on how much each organization's processes actually change. An industrial company with stable procedures looks nothing like one that changes its catalogue twice a year.
What makes this line cheaper is being able to edit content module by module instead of redoing the whole lesson. Changing a fragment of script, a voice or one step of a procedure without reproducing the other eight sections is an order-of-magnitude difference in hours, and it's what keeps the annual review a maintenance job rather than a second creation project. But the budget decision comes before the tool: if the line isn't in the plan, no tool will make it happen.
Three dates shape the 2027 plan and none of them are L&D's to move.
The credit won't be known until the national budget is passed. The training credit comes from the professional training contributions the company paid the previous year, multiplied by a percentage set each year in the Spanish national budget law according to headcount.² Today that percentage is 100% for companies of 6 to 9 people, 75% for 10 to 49, 60% for 50 to 249 and 50% from 250 up, with a guaranteed minimum of 420 euros for companies of 1 to 5.³ You can estimate the 2027 credit from your own contribution, but you can't close it until the budget is approved.
The works council's report is mandatory. Spanish Law 30/2015 requires training programming to respect the right to information and consultation of the workers' legal representatives, whose report must be formally requested.² And if there's disagreement, the law itself requires written, reasoned documentation of it.² This isn't a formality you can clear in the last week of December.
The credit expires with the December filing. Bonificaciones are applied after notifying that the training finished and, in any case, before the filing deadline for the final December social security submission of the current year.³ Training delivered on 20 December and reported in January no longer qualifies.
The practical consequence is that the 2027 plan gets decided in the last quarter of 2026, and that there's more room to manoeuvre in January than in October. Whatever you schedule for the fourth quarter competes with everyone else's year-end.
| When | Milestone | Why then |
|---|---|---|
| September and October 2026 | Inventory the current catalogue: what exists, how old it is, what has stopped being valid | It's what determines how much update budget to ask for, and it can't be improvised in December |
| October and November 2026 | Draft the plan and formally request the report from the workers' legal representatives | The report is mandatory and disagreements must be documented in writing;² requesting it late blocks approval |
| November and December 2026 | Close the plan, estimate the credit and schedule the first quarter | It leaves January free of admin and stops the 2027 start competing with the 2026 year-end |
The difference between a plan that survives the year and one that gets filed away in March isn't how many actions it contains. It's whether it accounts for what happens to them after they're delivered.
If the 2027 plan reserves capacity to update, defines how you'll check that something was learned, and puts the credit deadlines where they actually fall, the December 2027 conversation will be a different one. If it doesn't, it'll be this year's conversation again, with half the credit expiring one more time.
Training an organization isn't a project that closes. It's a cycle that gets maintained.
In the last quarter of 2026. The mandatory report from the workers' legal representatives needs lead time,² and first-quarter actions have to be settled before January so they can be reported and claimed in time.
It comes from multiplying the professional training contribution paid in 2026 by the percentage the national budget law sets according to headcount.² With the percentages currently in force (100% for 6 to 9 people, 75% for 10 to 49, 60% for 50 to 249 and 50% from 250) you can estimate it, but not confirm it until a budget is approved.³
Yes. Law 30/2015 requires formally requesting a report from the workers' legal representatives, and documenting any disagreements in writing with reasons.²
It expires. Bonificaciones have to be applied before the filing deadline for the current year's December social security submission.³ In 2025, 48.2% of the nationally assigned credit went unused.¹
There's no published standard. As a starting point, around a third of annual production capacity is a reasonable hypothesis that the first year lets you adjust, by measuring how much content actually went out of date.
By inventorying what exists and how old each piece is, before deciding what gets created in 2027. Our analysis of the state of AI in corporate training in Spain has the context data to situate your starting point against the rest of the market.
¹ Formación en el trabajo 2025. Informe anual, total nacional - Fundae ² Ley 30/2015, de 9 de septiembre, por la que se regula el Sistema de Formación Profesional para el empleo en el ámbito laboral, article 9 - BOE ³ Frequently asked questions on the training credit - Fundae
Programme to promote permanent employment of qualified young people within the framework of the National Youth Guarantee System. Vidext has received a grant of €25,401 awarded by LABORA (Valencian Employment and Training Service) for the permanent hiring in 2024 of qualified young person(s) registered in the National Youth Guarantee System, an action eligible for co-financing by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) 2021-2027 or any other European Union fund. Expediente ECOGJU/2024/550/46. This publication is made in compliance with the transparency obligations established by Spanish Law 19/2013 of 9 December.
