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The Leitch Report's listing of British skills deficiencies are almost as well known in human resources and policy circles as our favourite telephone numbers: 5m adults without functional literacy; 17m without the numeracy standards required of a 16 years old; Britain ranked 20th out of the 30 OECD countries in terms of basic skills; Britain as the slow learner of Europe; and - relative to our economy - falling down poorly on skills.  A fusillade of policy initiatives have been fired at the problem, but are they working?

The key features of the world post-Leitch are:

Train To Gain. There is a lot of promise that this initiative will help employers meet their skills requirements.  Yet there is some dissatisfaction in parts of the country with the service on offer which is seen as bureaucratic and cumbersome as reported in the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development recent Labour Market Outlook survey. Many employers report lengthy waits for a consultation with a skills broker and many complain that their training solutions are often inadequate to the organisation. More welcome is the extra financial help for smaller employers - an acknowledgement that training is not costless and that the downtime of training can be a considerable cost.

The Skills Pledge: The pledge is like many initiatives - confusing, poorly communicated and has been met by indifference. Some 13 per cent of respondents to the CIPD’s latest 2008 Learning and Development survey have signed up to the Skills Pledge. That number improves - as our focus groups show - when the real aim of the pledge is communicated to employers. Yet, many employers resent the idea that government should need them to publicly declare their support for what is in effect a political initiative.

However, it is not a bad idea to have a public commitment to training and development. As the shocking numbers at the head of this article show, its in no one’s interest to have 7m who, through their poor reading skills, cannot access training and development or 5m whose numeracy level is so poor their productivity is significantly impaired.  However, without a focus, the skills pledge is just a piece of warm wording. That said, the government is listening. It aims to communicate the Skills Pledge more coherently and efficiently to employers signing up to the pledge.

Recognising the value of in-work training through new on the job vocational qualifications. Showcase pilots at Flybe, MacDonald's and Network Rail promise much and are welcome as it is important that training is linked to the best learning environment of all, the job. Our surveys consistently show this. The fact that employers spend over £33bn on training - although a third of employers spend nothing at all - shows the massive contribution that employers are putting into the UK's training effort. UK employers rank well above most of Europe in terms of vocational training spend, a sure sign that throwing money at a problem should never be seen as the solution, given our continued problems.

However, work-based training is the most effective delivery mechanism, and the trend towards more of it is welcome. The new "in company" A-levels are likely to gain critical mass as employers like Tesco adopts its own vocational route. The importance of applied in-house knowledge cannot be underestimated.  It’s also important to recognise that much of this training will be above the Level 2 priority set by the government. For example, advanced apprenticeships are almost always at Level 3 or above.

Although the Leitch Report focuses on basic skills deficiency, the level of management training is a major cause of the UK’s lagging productivity. The management problem is buried deeper in the Leitch Report. The UK spends about three-times less for each manager on management training than Germany and 41 per cent of managers have no further qualification above Level 2.

Continuous professional development, needs to be recognised. Training provides a huge and tangible fillip to management development. We need to address both our basic skills problems and our intermediate level problems.

The expansion of apprenticeships is perhaps the most troubling policy for employers. The government has inflated the promise of apprenticeships and failed to put the incentives in place to encourage employers to provide them. The fact that the public sector and especially central government is providing a fraction of the apprentice places it needs to shows that this is a systemic problem. The government has simply announced an increase in apprenticeship places, raised the expectations of young people and their parents, and did nothing to build the provision.

It would have been much more sensible, as the House of Lords Economic Affairs report suggested, to have a longer term plan building places incrementally - ministerial announcements of a "doubling of places" and an "apprenticeship for every young person who wants one" offer much but lack a strategic plan.

A major danger is that the gold standard of apprenticeships will be debased by re-badging every form of training as an apprenticeship. Some jobs do not require that level of training, although many do. There are a huge number of apprenticeship places to be generated in SMEs and in the public sector. The government needs to focus on encouraging employers with the right incentives to provide places and ways in which incentives for employers can be addressed, needs to be investigated.

While the focus on Level 2 is important, the CIPD also believes there is a need to focus on the key issues of soft skills and higher level skills. Academic iconoclasts such as Ken Mayhew and Alison Wolf believe that the skills agenda is oversold and that government is confusing supply and demand. Whatever these more rarefied debates, most employers see plentiful evidence that we need to act but has the action been appropriate?

Overall, the government has made the mistake of offering too many initiatives, some of which are not yet in place and most of which are simply routes into Train to Gain. The CIPD believes that the need to build the skills base means we need to act.  The government now recognises that it needs to put more into upper level skills. The direction of travel is about right, however government needs to keep checking that its route map is appropriate for navigating a way though the skills challenges we face.

John McGurk is a Learning, Training and Development adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development