Governments are encouraging enterprises to enhance their expenditure on vocational education and training to assist with maintaining and developing further national skill bases, while sharing the cost with those enterprises. However, there are clear differences between what government intends and enterprise practice. This paper reports a review of the recent literature which focuses on the expenditure by enterprise on vocational education and their interest in securing returns on that expenditure. Enterprise expenditure is far from uniform and is influenced by factors including their size, speciality and location. Moreover, enterprise interest on returns on their expenditure is focused on goals which are of a different kind from those of government and may not be aligned to achieving long-term national goals of maintaining and developing the skilfulness of the workforce.