The overriding theme of this book on employer engagement has been ‘making active labour market policies work’. This is to say that, while our collection offers a broad and varied intellectual exploration of employer engagement – including its meaning, interpretation and practice in comparative context – our ultimate aim has been to arrive at a clearer understanding of how employers may contribute to ALMPs in a way that successfully secures sustained employment for people who are often widely left outside the workplace. We have approached this by exploring the issues at three levels: macro (institutional and national policy), meso (regional and implementation through partners) and micro (workplace organization).

It is clear from the material in this book that there is no magic formula for engaging employers to make ALMPs work. The diversity of policy orientation and institutional machinery across countries and within regions is simply too great and complex, as is the variety of partners, programmes and the employers themselves. Yet despite the complexity and diversity of employer engagement policy, implementation and practice, we can conclude that some general, and critical, lessons that may be drawn in order to shed light on the pragmatic question facing all countries about how employers may be engaged more effectively in active labour market policies. Firstly, we synthesize the lessons from the different country contexts in the collection’s chapters. Secondly, we offer some ingredients for successful employer engagement at macro, meso and micro levels. Finally, we set out an agenda for future research and scholarship in this area.

General lessons from the country cases

Three of the chapters in the collection are devoted to international comparison, specifically between the UK, Denmark and The Netherlands (Bredgaard, Ingold and van Berkel), then between the UK and Australia (Baker, Ingold, Crichton and Carr) and finally between the UK and Germany (Wiggan and Knuth). The remaining chapters are all based on single-country studies, though the only country beyond this set of countries is the USA (Hanson and Moore; Moore, Hanson and Gustafson). This is helpful in that the conclusions drawn in the comparative chapters provide a useful set of starting points on which the conclusions from the single-country chapters may then build, to create a richer set of contextualized insights.