Nearly 30,000 Workers Applied for Portugal's €750 Digital-Training Cheque Before It Closed, With AI the Most-Wanted Skill
Portugal's €750 digital-training voucher drew 29,874 applications before it closed on 30 June, with artificial intelligence the most-requested subject. The late rush pushed the scheme well past its 25,000-worker target — a snapshot of a workforce racing to keep pace with technology.
One of Portugal's main digital-upskilling schemes has closed its doors, and the final tally shows a late rush. The Cheque-Formação + Digital — a voucher worth up to €750 that reimburses workers for digital-training courses — drew 29,874 applications by its 30 June deadline, the state employment institute (Instituto do Emprego e Formação Profissional, IEFP) has confirmed. Of those, 21,675 have been approved, 15,712 already paid, 5,765 rejected and 2,434 still under review.
The approved applications commit about €14.3 million, and the programme comfortably passed its target of reaching 25,000 workers. That marks a sharp acceleration: as recently as late May the scheme counted 16,024 approvals and €7.5 million in reimbursements, meaning much of the demand arrived in the final weeks before the door shut — a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched a funding deadline concentrate the mind.
What people wanted to learn is its own small map of the labour market's anxieties. The most-requested fields, according to the IEFP, were artificial intelligence, data analysis and data science, digital marketing, programming, cybersecurity, graphic design and the building of e-commerce and marketplace platforms — with AI at the top of the list. These are the skills workers evidently believe will keep them employable, and the voucher was designed precisely to lower the cost of acquiring them.
That design also explains why the scheme was a slow starter. Because the worker generally pays for the course first and is reimbursed afterwards, the up-front cost deterred many would-be applicants in the early going, and the government extended the deadline more than once. The money is drawn from the Recovery and Resilience Plan (Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência, PRR), whose disbursement clock runs out at the end of 2026, so the timing was not a matter of choice. The final surge suggests the incentive eventually did its job.
For Portugal's foreign residents, the IEFP is more than the paymaster of a training cheque. It is the state employment service where jobseekers register, the body that runs vocational courses and the gateway to a range of subsidised programmes — a first stop we have mapped for newcomers trying to find work in the country. Anyone registered with the institute at the end of April was one of 283,290 people on its books, a figure that has been easing as the labour market stays tight.
The digital cheque itself is now spent, but it is unlikely to be the last of its kind: the IEFP has signalled a broader training voucher that would reach beyond digital skills. If the closing numbers are any guide, the appetite is there — and, increasingly, it points toward the very technologies that workers fear could otherwise leave them behind.
