Take study leave without giving up your job

No. This is the single thing to be clear about before you plan anything else. Studieledighetslagen gives you the right to be away from work and to come back to your job with your terms intact. It does not give you salary, it does not give you tuition, and it does not oblige your employer to contribute anything. Some employers do pay something voluntarily, and some collective agreements or individual contracts add benefits on top of the statutory minimum, so it is worth reading your kollektivavtal and asking, but the law itself guarantees nothing beyond the job. Plan the leave as a period with no income, and finance the course separately.

The right is statutory, so this is not a favour you are asking for, but your employer does control the timing. They may normally postpone the start by up to six months, and postponing longer than that normally requires the agreement of the local union at a workplace with a kollektivavtal. Two things follow. First, ask early: a request that arrives more than six months before the cohort starts, with a syllabus and a schedule attached, is much harder to defer than a vague one made in July for September. Second, if the two of you disagree about whether the studies qualify or how long the deferral should be, your union representative is the first place to go rather than the last. Approval of the timing is never automatic, and the decision on postponement is your employer's to make within those limits.

Yes. Studieledighetslagen puts no conditions on the provider, the country or the delivery mode. It does not require a Swedish school, it does not require state approval of the education, and it does not distinguish between attending in person and attending a live online classroom. What the law does require, through Arbetsdomstolen's case law, is that the studies be planmässiga: a predetermined format, systematic planning and concrete study goals. Your employer is entitled to ask you to document that. Our courses meet the test because they have a published syllabus, a fixed cohort schedule with dates and teaching hours, live instruction, graded projects and a certificate at the end, and we give you all of that in writing before you make the request. A purely self-paced course, by contrast, would be a weak case, and honest advice is not to try to build one on it.

Ask for the refusal or the postponement in writing, with the reason. The reasons split into three and each has a different answer. If the objection is that the studies are not structured enough, send the syllabus, the cohort schedule and the enrolment confirmation: that is exactly what the planmässiga test asks for and it often resolves the question on its own. If it is timing, agree a later intake in writing now and take the certainty rather than the argument. If your employer is postponing beyond six months, that normally requires the local union's agreement at a workplace with a kollektivavtal, so involve your fackklubb. And if the leave does not work out at all, the course still can: our part-time cohorts run live outside standard working hours, so you can study without any leave, without any permission and without losing income.

Not for a course with us, and we would rather tell you that now than after you have spent three months on an application. Omställningsstudiestöd, the flagship benefit paying around 80% of previous salary, does not cover studies abroad. Ordinary studiemedel can in principle be used for distance studies at a school within the EU or EEA, but the education has to be approved by UHR or CSN, which requires state recognition in the host country and a Swedish equivalent that qualifies for studiemedel. Our bootcamps do not have that approval. If you are in a redundancy process, the omställningsorganisationer such as TRR and TSL are a different matter: they do buy courses for their clients, the decision rests with your adviser and is made case by case, so it is a legitimate question to put to them early. What we will not do is let you plan a period without salary around public money that cannot be granted.

In this order. Ask your employer to fund the fee even if they will not pay salary, since a one-off training cost and a payroll cost are separate decisions and in Sweden the fee is often a tax-free benefit for you. If that does not land, take our interest-free monthly instalments, up to 60 payments, paid directly to Code Labs Academy, which spreads the tuition across up to five years instead of concentrating it in the months you have no income. If you have savings, the upfront-payment discount is cheaper overall, and there are further discounts listed on our site. Union study grants can add a few thousand kronor. And do keep the simplest option in view: studying part-time in the evenings alongside your job avoids the income loss entirely, and for a lot of people it is the better plan rather than the compromise.