Abstract:

Introduction:
In 2011, the Greek Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs ordered the full digitization of the training voucher management process. For this purpose, it recommended the «TRAINING VOUCHER» system, which aims to achieve a structured path for the entry of unemployed in the labour market. The «TRAINING VOUCHER» is being supported by an integrated information system which provides and manages educational and vocational training services (https://voucher.gov.gr), which was designed, implemented and is operational under the CTI “Diophantus”, which is an institution supervised by the Ministry of Education and Religion. Using the «TRAINING VOUCHER», the Ministry of Labour provides civilians, businesses (vocational training centers) and the supervising public authorities with high quality e-servicesthrough out the training life cycle, i.e. from the beneficiary’s application submission to the payment.

3 Management environments:
1) The public home page, which is accessible to all individuals and provides information about the calls, the educational programs etc. Moreover, it is the page where the beneficiaries’ applications take place, as well as the relevant results are published.
2) The management environment for the Vocational Training Centers (voucher.gov.gr/kekadmin), which is accessible to the authorized training providers that have previously applied to participate in each call (and have been approved by the relevant supervising public authority) and provides the jurisdiction of managing all the individual training procedures and minimizing the use of documents and bureaucracy.
3) The management environment for the Supervising Public Authorities (voucher.gov.gr/admin), which is accessible to the Supervising Public Authorities of each call and provides the jurisdiction of monitoring and supervising the foreseen for the training programs procedures, thereby greatly reducing management costs and implementation, monitoring and controlling completion time.

Specialized subsystems / Interconnection with other systems:
VOUCHER adopts a modular architecture and consists of several individual subsystems, which are factored conveniently for each call, thus supporting the workflow and the data management that is expected per call. The main subsystems are: User management, Beneficiary Applications management, Vocational Training Centre Applications management, Beneficiaries management, Educational programs management, Consulting, Traineeship, Certification, Microdata, Payments, Interoperability.

VOUCHER exchanges data online with other public information systems, like those of the Manpower Employment Organization, National Organization for the Certification of Qualifications & Vocational Guidance, Deposit and Loans Fund, Consignment Deposits and Loans Fund etc., thus minimizing document exchanges and bureaucracy. Concurrently, the engaging public authorities can monitor and supervise in real time the procedures that are expected for the training programs through the VOUCHER, dramatically reducing the managing cost, as well as the completion time of the implementation, monitoring and control procedures of the programs.

Statistics:
Since April 2012, 29 calls have been implemented through VOUCHER, with 3 of them still being active and with a total of 616.217 participation applications. In total, 463 training providers and 85.088 businesses have offered theoretical and practical training, respectively, to 192.484 beneficiaries.

Keywords:

Training voucher, grant beneficiaries system, vocational training, information system design.