France Travail Funding: AIF, POEI, AFC — the Guide for a Training Organization

A jobseeker contacts you, interested in your training course, and mentions “France Travail” funding. Many training organization founders are familiar with the OPCO or CPF funding routes, but discover this third channel — far from marginal — only when a first prospect asks about it and they don’t know how to answer. Here’s how France Travail funding actually works, and what you need to set up to access it.

The three France Travail schemes, in brief

France Travail (formerly Pôle emploi) doesn’t fund vocational training as a single block: three distinct schemes coexist, each with different logic and audiences.

• AIF (Aide Individuelle à la Formation — Individual Training Aid) funds an individualized training course for a specific jobseeker, when their training project, validated as part of their support plan, cannot be covered by any other funding source (CPF, Region, employer). It’s a subsidiary scheme: the advisor must first confirm no other source is sufficient.
• POEI (Préparation Opérationnelle à l’Emploi Individuelle — Individual Pre-Hire Training) prepares an identified candidate to fill a specific position, in partnership with an employer who has a vacancy and commits to hiring at the end of the training.
• AFC (Action de Formation Conventionnée — Contracted Training Action) corresponds to places purchased collectively by France Travail’s regional directorates through a public tender, targeting occupations facing labor shortages identified in the region. Access for a training organization means responding to a call for tenders, not individual registration.

For an organization just starting out, AIF is generally the most accessible entry point: it requires neither a public tender nor a prior employer partnership, only an interested jobseeker and an advisor who validates the project.

The prerequisite: Qualiopi certification

As with OPCO or CPF funding, access to France Travail funding has been conditional, since January 1, 2022, on holding a quality certification issued by a COFRAC-accredited body — Qualiopi in the vast majority of cases (Article L6316-1 of the French Labor Code). Without valid certification, no AIF, POEI, or AFC funding request can be approved, regardless of how good your training offer is. If you’re still unsure whether you need to get certified, this article covers it.

Note: Qualiopi opens the right to funding, but it doesn’t make your offer visible on its own. The next step determines whether a France Travail advisor can actually find you.

Getting listed: Carif-Oref, Dokelio, and Kairos

Kairos is the tool France Travail advisors use day to day to search for a training course and build a funding request with a jobseeker. But Kairos isn’t a registration desk for training organizations: it’s a consultation interface, fed by the regional catalogs maintained by the Carif-Oref (regional centers for training resources and information), called Dokelio in Île-de-France and by other names in other regions.

In practice, the process happens in two steps:

1. Register your organization and your training sessions with your region’s Carif-Oref, using your activity declaration number (see our article on the Cerfa 10782 activity declaration). Each validated session receives a session number (SE), a unique identifier later used in funding files.
2. Let the information flow into Kairos. Once your session is registered and validated by the Carif-Oref, it generally appears in Kairos within a few days, with timing that varies from region to region.

The quality of the data you enter — precise title, ROME occupation codes, objectives, duration, prerequisites — directly determines your visibility in advisors’ searches: a vague or poorly indexed listing simply won’t surface in their results.

What AIF actually covers

AIF covers the pedagogical cost of the training, within caps and rules that vary by France Travail’s regional directorate and change regularly: always verify the exact amount with the relevant advisor or local office rather than relying on a figure found online. One principle stays constant, however: the quote must be submitted and approved before the first day of training. As with an OPCO funding request, a request submitted after the fact is almost always rejected — this is the most common mistake among organizations discovering this channel.

What the research says about the effectiveness of these schemes

Training funded by public employment agencies isn’t just a matter of administrative process: its actual effectiveness on returning people to work is the subject of a substantial body of labor economics research. A landmark meta-analysis by David Card, Jochen Kluve, and Andrea Weber, published in 2018 in the Journal of the European Economic Association under the title “What Works? A Meta Analysis of Recent Active Labor Market Program Evaluations,” reviews more than 200 evaluations of active labor market schemes worldwide (see the study on Google Scholar). The authors show that individualized training programs — exactly AIF’s profile — produce positive employment effects mainly in the medium term, after two to three years, unlike direct job-search assistance schemes whose effect is faster but fades more quickly. This sheds light on part of France Travail’s logic: reserving AIF for genuinely well-built training projects rather than a generic, fast-turnaround response.

Common mistakes organizations make when starting on this channel

• Confusing Qualiopi listing with Carif-Oref listing. Being certified isn’t enough: without a session registered with the regional Carif-Oref, your organization stays invisible to France Travail advisors.
• Not planning for lead time. Between registering a session and its actual appearance in Kairos, expect several days: a funding file put together at the last minute, the day before training starts, risks failing.
• Neglecting consistency between the published title and the actual content. An advisor searches by target occupation and ROME code: a title that’s too generic or mismatched with the actual training content hurts visibility and can be flagged during a catalog quality check.
• Forgetting that AFC follows a different logic. Unlike AIF and POEI, AFC isn’t accessible through simple registration: you need to respond to a regional public tender, with its own deadlines and specifications.

Take action

The Complete Qualiopi Kit brings together the templates and evidence needed to obtain and then maintain your Qualiopi certification, the essential entry condition for AIF, POEI, and every other public or pooled funder (€297, 14-day guarantee). If you’re just starting your business, the ebook Create Your Training Organization in 30 Days walks through the administrative steps starting from your activity declaration, and the complete pack bundles both resources.