Maybe it’s the Obama effect, but there’s a lot of talk in government about “activism”. A couple of months ago, Peter Mandelson, relishing the new freedom he has, gave a lecture to the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) about “industrial activism”; and only last month, skills secretary John Denham talked to the annual conference of the Federation of Small Businesses about “the new activism I want to inspire around skills”. But what does activism actually mean?

It certainly means more than getting on board the latest government initiative. Denham and his colleagues are keen indeed to have more employers sign up for apprenticeships, which is why they’ve employed an unusually sage-sounding Alan Sugar to promote them. But activism is more than passive participation in something the government has designed.

A good example is the employer responsiveness programme, a rather wooden title for the only government initiative in recent years to get vocational training on the front pages of the popular press. Remember “McQualifications”? An unfair slight on the excellent training done by McDonald’s that has now won recognition by Ofqual. This is activism in the sense that the government is saying to employers: “If you don’t like the qualifications you see around you, design your own.”

Much of what the government encouraged through that programme can be done anyway. The hurdles are set deliberately high for any organisation that wants to be recognised by Ofqual as an awarding organisation, but there’s no bar to any particular type of organisation succeeding. What’s new is the encouragement to employers to take action themselves.

There was a similar shifting of the tectonic plates with another announcement from Denham’s department last month. He announced a new £20 million fund to encourage local communities to set up small, informal learning centres. It was called, rather grandly, a “learning revolution” (a label which surely only works in the Maoist sense of the longest journey starting with the first step). It needs to be seen in the context of the huge cuts in funding for adult learning in recent years, but, in effect, Denham is saying: “The world is an imperfect place, join me in helping to sort things.”

Here is clear recognition that the state can’t do everything, and some steps - rather tentative steps perhaps, but surely to be encouraged - towards a new balance between what employers (and others) try to do and what the state does alongside them. It is a call to arms to employers not to accept the world as we find it, but to get stuck in and take action. I doubt if the reality will match the rhetoric, but if secretary of state for skills is ready to open the door then employers should take him at his word and knock on it.