LVD

LVD designs and builds sheet metalworking machines in Gullegem: laser cutting, punching, bending, shearing, and the software around them. The company is active in more than forty countries. On the Belgian payroll, welders and fitters sit alongside service technicians, engineers and office staff, and each of those groups follows a different training track: safety certificates on the shop floor, product training for after-sales service, language and software at the office.

From twenty employees you must have a training plan, and its content has to be settled by 31 March at the latest. The draft goes to the works council at least fifteen days before the meeting. Then comes a second, separate obligation that is easily missed: within one month of the plan taking effect you send a copy to the FPS Employment (SPF Emploi), and if the plan contains personal data, that copy has to be anonymised first. Alongside that run the individual training entitlement, five days a year per full-time employee and pro rata for part-timers, and the training section of the social balance sheet filed with the annual accounts.

Since the Federal Learning Account was abolished on 1 January 2026, no federal database keeps track of this for you: your own record is the evidence. In Smart Lions a training goes in once, with its date, hours, participants, cost and subsidy, and is classified once as formal or informal. The training plan and the social balance sheet use that same definition, so that single classification serves both. A production worker's welding course and a service technician's product training run through the same register.

The training plan as an export for the works council, plus the anonymised copy for the FPS Employment as a separate document. The training entitlement per employee in days, calculated on the joint committee, with days taken and days outstanding side by side. The training figures for the social balance sheet in the National Bank's code order: the training section, not the complete social balance sheet. And for anyone working with certificates, an expiry date with a reminder before it lapses, plus a certification matrix showing who still has what valid.