This article highlights a five-year project known as Enhancing "Skills for Life": Adult Basic Skills and Workplace Learning which focuses on what workplace basic skills programmes "do" work, when and by what means. A research team headed by Alison Wolf will assess the impact of workplace basic skills programmes on employers and their workers. The project, which is funded by the Teaching and Learning Research Programme, with support from the National Research and Development Centre (NRDC), will engage learners, practitioners, providers and employers in analysing the immediate and long-term outcomes of programmes targeting the improvement of adult basic skills. The focus of the project will be on the factors that make workplace basic skills programmes more or less successful. Wolf thinks that getting people's skills significantly improved is going to be a major undertaking. The team is still in the process of collecting first phase data signing up companies and learners, giving them a first set of interviews and tests. The project's success will depend, in part, on its sensitivity to the real issues facing employers and learners.