Over 60% of managers feel things are better for them than last year

ILM-Approved Training Centre, Impellus, has tracked the confidence of managers attending its open management courses for the last 12 months and can reveal that consistently 60%+ of delegates felt that things were better for them at work generally than a year ago.

Political and seasonal impact

When looking at the graph below, it can be seen that there were slight dips in the number of managers feeling things were better in July 2016 and at the end of 2016 and start of 2017. Whether these dips were due to half-yearly and end of year deadlines/pressures or political events in the UK and the USA, or a mixture, is unknown.

Interestingly, the Spring 2017 Employee Outlook¹ from the CIPD shows that almost a third of employees believe that their organisation has been impacted by wider political changes in the UK and the US either a great deal or to some extent. However, managers experiencing Impellus’ ILM Level 3 and 5 leadership training remain confident.

Some of the proven benefits of training managers include increased confidence and motivation, a greater feeling of empowerment and being valued by the organisation that has invested in their learning and development. These feelings are certainly echoed in the trends we have observed for the last 12 months and are particularly encouraging, as 58% of HR professionals quoted ‘leadership’ as the skills most likely to increase in demand in the next 12 months in a recent CIPD Resourcing and Talent Planning survey2.

Background

As part of Impellus’ course feedback process, delegates are asked to respond with ‘Better’, ‘The Same’ or ‘Worse’ to the statement: ‘In my opinion things for me at work are generally …… than at this time last year.’  Monthly scores since June 2016 have ranged from 62% to 75% for ‘Better’, which indicates that managers across a variety of organisations in the private, public and charitable sectors are resilient to external and seasonal factors when it comes to their optimism in the workplace. The percentage of delegates feeling that things are ‘Worse’ ranged from 3% to 8%.

Additional key indicators from May’s Impellus training courses can be read in our monthly Pulse blog.

1 CIPD Employee Outlook Spring 2017 took place in February & March 2017.

2  CIPD & Hays Talent Resourcing Survey 2017.