Training Room Insights – 1st Quarter 2018

As one of the largest ILM-Approved Training Centres in the UK, Impellus delivers management open courses to more than 250 delegates a month. To ensure our high-quality customer service is maintained, we request feedback from each delegate on the course content and trainer’s delivery, as well as the venue.

We also asks for the delegate’s opinion on their work situation at the time they attended the course. By analysing this feedback regularly, we can report as to how senior managers and managers are feeling up and down the country in our Training Room Insights.

Increasingly managers feel that training helps ‘enormously’ to improve their performance

The key indicators from delegates attending our open courses in the first quarter of 2018 are as follows:

  • Thirty-six per cent of delegates felt that ‘training like this improves my performance enormously’ – which is up from 32% last year. These figures actually represent a 13% increase over the same quarter in 2017. When we combine those delegates who felt that ‘training like this improves my performance enormously or measurably so’, there was a 3% uplift yoy.
  • These results reinforce the value of management and leadership training, as the statements are made by the delegates themselves rather than by their organisations. Set against the backdrop of a slight dip in managers’ optimism compared with the same quarter in 2017, this rise in delegates feeling that training helps them enormously is significant.
  • The number of organisations training new and recently appointed managers has dropped slightly year on year – with 69% of all delegates having been in their role three years or less compared with 71% during the same quarter of 2017
  • There was also a noticeable decrease in the percentage of delegates experiencing our courses who were longer-serving managers. In the first quarter, 8% of all delegates had been in their role for ten years or more – down from 13% for the same period in 2017.

Management confidence has fallen slightly compared with the same quarter last year. The chart below shows the delegates’ responses to the statement: In my opinion, things for me at work are generally better/ the same/ worse than at this time last year. Sixty-six per cent of all delegates feel that things are generally better for them than a year ago compared with 67% in the same quarter of 2017. Five per cent feel things are worse which is on a par with 2017. Management optimism has recovered somewhat from that last quarter of 2017, however, when 62% felt things were better.

From the graph below where we can see the results on a rolling month by month basis for the last year, it is refreshing to see ‘better’ scores returning to the upper 60’s for the months of December, January and February after the dips between July – November last year. However, management optimism took a downward turn again in March, so it will be interesting to see what happens in the second quarter of 2018.