Free AI and tech training: AI Skills Boost, Get Tech Certified and who can claim them

Free training is only useful if you can claim it and it points at the job you want. This winter there are two schemes on offer, and the rules for each are different.

AI Skills Boost: free AI courses for every adult

AI Skills Boost is a joint government and industry programme. In January 2026 the government widened it to give every adult in the UK access to free AI foundations training, and set a target of upskilling 10 million workers by 2030, including at least 2 million employees of small and medium-sized businesses.

The courses are listed on the government's AI Skills Hub, where you need to create an account. A selection of industry-built courses have been checked against Skills England's AI foundation skills for work benchmark, and finishing one earns a government-backed virtual AI foundations badge. Some take under 20 minutes. They teach practical uses of simple AI tools, such as drafting text, creating content and handling administrative tasks.

The founding partners include Accenture, Amazon, Barclays, BT, Google, IBM, Intuit, Microsoft, Sage, SAS and Salesforce. Cisco, Cognizant, Multiverse, techUK and the NHS have since joined them.

Two things to bear in mind. First, free has limits. FE Week's analysis of the hub's catalogue found that around 60% of listed courses charged a fee, although all but four of the 137 courses from Microsoft, Google and Amazon were free. Check the price on the course page before you enrol. Second, this is AI literacy. For a developer, data engineer or security analyst, an AI foundations badge is a useful extra, not a substitute for technical depth.

Get Tech Certified: free certifications for public sector staff

Get Tech Certified is run by the Government Digital Service. From 1 October to 31 December 2026, all civil and public servants can access more than 250 free learning and certification pathways, from beginner to advanced, in areas including cloud, cyber security, data, machine learning and AI, architecture and software engineering. Providers include AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Databricks, Snowflake, ServiceNow and QA.

Who can claim: all UK civil servants and public sector employees, across central and local government, health, education and other eligible public sector organisations. You have to register with your work email address, and contractors are not eligible. You do not need a digital job, and there are beginner pathways.

The deadline is easy to misread. In most cases you do not have to finish your learning by 31 December, but you do need to have signed up to your chosen pathway and applied for an exam voucher, if one applies, by then. Free certification vouchers are handed out one at a time, and not every pathway ends in a certificate, so check what the provider's page promises.

If you are not in the public sector, the AI Skills Hub is your starting point. The government's Digital and Technologies Jobs Plan also points to Skills Bootcamps, which are courses of up to 16 weeks that help adults retrain for a specific role, and to the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, which opens for applications from the end of October 2026 for courses starting from January 2027.

How to choose a course for the role you want

Most of the roles we recruit for ask for commercial experience, so treat training as a way to add a skill or change direction, not as a replacement for experience. Within that, a few rules of thumb:

• Look at ten job adverts for your target role before you choose. Note which platforms and certifications come up, and train on those.
• Software engineering: employers hire on what you have built. A certificate helps most when it sits next to a project on GitHub.
• Cloud: AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud all feature in Get Tech Certified. Pick the one your target employers use.
• Data: Databricks and Snowflake both offer pathways. As with cloud, follow the platform named in the adverts.
• Cyber security: check which certifications the adverts name before you spend time or money on an exam.
• AI roles: the foundations badge is a start. For machine learning roles, look beyond tool use to the underlying maths and hands-on projects.
• Whatever you pick, finish one thing. A completed pathway with a certificate or badge reads better than five half-finished courses.

Our guide to building a career in technology covers the main routes in and the skills employers look for.

Sources: GOV.UK, free AI training for every adult (28 January 2026); Government Digital and Data Hub, Get Tech Certified and FAQs; GOV.UK, Digital and Technologies Jobs Plan (21 October 2026); FE Week, AI Skills Hub course analysis (22 April 2026).