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Employer Training Pilots (ETPs) were introduced in the UK in September 2002 to encourage employers to invest in skills and qualifications, particularly through support for workers with low skill levels. The ETP offers free or subsidised training leading to a basic skills or first Level 2 qualification for employees qualified to below Level 2, where the employees receive paid time off in which to train, and for which the employers are compensated. A total of 23,000 employers (mostly small employers with under 50 employees) and almost 200,000 employees were involved in the first three years of the ETPs. This report presents the results of the evaluation covering this period from 1 September 2002 to 31 August 2005. The evaluation had two main strands: a quantitative assessment of the effect of ETP on workplace training activity in pilot and control areas, through analysis of surveys of potentially eligible employers and employees, and other sources, including the Labour Force Survey; and a more qualitative ‘process’ evaluation including surveys and interviews with the main stakeholders, providers, employers and learners involved in each of the pilot areas, and analysis of management information data. The main lessons for policy development are that: there is still a large unmet potential demand for qualifications-based training among low-skilled employees, despite the large volume of participation; the policy needs to engage with the ‘harder to reach’ employers to maximise additionality and minimise deadweight; the policy set out to tackle the barriers of cost and time but it was the changes to supply and the provision of free, flexibly provided and brokered training that appeared to have the most effect in this regard, although wage compensation did make a difference in some cases; application of the ‘assess train assess’ model was relatively rare, but should be encouraged, since a thorough initial assessment makes a significant difference to the success of the subsequent training; although ETP appears to have involved significant amounts of assessment rather than formal training, the overall benefits to learners (and employers) of the learning process were evident in high satisfaction ratings, in relatively high completion rates, and in learners (and employers) identifying skill and work-performance gains; and ETP learners are more inclined to undertake further learning at the end of their training than when they started.