Guest Blog: Andrew Palmer, deputy director of CBI Yorkshire and Humber, gives his take on the Government's Leitch Review of Skills.

Nobody reading the Leitch report could deny that we have to raise our game on skills if the UK is to seize the opportunities that globalisation brings and mitigate its downsides, at a time when jobs for the unskilled are becoming more scarce.
Currently, too many employers remain confused and bewildered by the skills infrastructure. There is a clear need to ensure a better match between publicly-funded courses and the training and development that employers and employees are looking for.
Companies will wholeheartedly endorse Lord Leitch’s central tenet that the skills needs of employers - and their employees - should be put at the heart of the UK's adult training system. Leitch is right to advocate that training should be demand-led, and that public funds should only go to those vocational courses accredited by employer-led Sector Skills Councils.
Business already spends £33 billion a year on training and is more than willing to play its part in upskilling the workforce further to safeguard the UK's competitiveness. The CBI will encourage its members to respond to Leitch's call for employers to help their employees gain a basic skills and GCSE-level qualification by using the Government's 'Train to Gain' initiative.
There is no magic bullet that will solve the UK's skills shortfalls. These are long-term challenges requiring long-term thinking. Despite suggestions that compulsion could be revisited, Leitch is right to have focused on incentives and reforms, rather than compelling firms to train, for which a good case has never been made. As Leitch highlights in today's report, a blunt 'one size fits all' form of compulsion is unlikely to be effective.
Lord Leitch's report provides a blueprint for reform that could, if fully implemented, put us on course to improve the UK's skills profile dramatically over the course of the next two decades. It is now up to Government to deliver Leitch's vision.