Can an employer get government help in designing and running its own employee training program?

The assistance the Council provides employers

Article 49 names employer assistance directly among the Council's functions. It states that the Council shall provide, through the Secretariat, instructor training, entrepreneurship development, training in vocations, trades and other fields of employment, and assist any employer or organization in training schemes designed to attain its objectives. That last clause answers your question specifically: an employer designing its own training scheme is not left to work it out alone, since the article contemplates the Council assisting employers with schemes aimed at the employer's own objectives, not only government-run programs.

That assistance operates under rules the Council itself sets

The assistance is not open-ended or informal. Article 49 conditions it "under rules and regulations which the Council shall establish for this purpose." So an employer seeking this kind of help works within a framework the Council defines, rather than negotiating an arrangement from scratch each time. Knowing that this assistance is rule-based is useful context: what an employer can actually request or expect depends on those established rules and regulations, not on the bare text of the article alone.

This sits within a broader manpower development structure

Article 49 places employer assistance alongside a wider set of responsibilities: administering technical assistance programs and grants-in-aid for manpower and youth development, and coordinating manpower training schemes generally so that skills standards remain consistent nationally. The article requires that "existing manpower training programs in the government and in the private sector shall be reported to the Council," which may regulate them to align with national development programs. An employer's own training program, once assisted or coordinated under this framework, is not operating in isolation from that larger reporting and coordination structure.

What falls outside this article

Article 49 draws its own boundary at the end: this Article shall not include apprentices, learners and handicapped workers as governed by appropriate provisions of this Code. So if your training program specifically concerns apprentices, learners, or handicapped workers, this particular article is not the one governing that arrangement; those categories are addressed by other, more specific provisions of the Code rather than by the general employer-assistance function described here.

Related provisions

• Labor Code, Article 49 — Administration Of Training Programs