The temperature in the training room – July 2017

As one of the largest UK ILM-Approved Training Centres, Impellus provides leadership and management open courses to over 250 delegates a month. We ask for feedback from each delegate on the venue, course content and trainer’s delivery to assess our customer satisfaction level.

Our questionnaire also asks for the delegate’s opinion on their work situation. By analysing this data regularly, we have a good indication of how senior managers and managers are feeling across the country.

Greatest fall in Management Confidence in a year

The key indicators from delegates attending our open courses in July are as follows:

  • The number of organisations training new and recently appointed managers dropped slightly year on year – 61% of all delegates had been in their role three years or less compared with 66% in July 2016
  • Interestingly, the percentage of delegates this July had been in their current role for ten years or more increased from 10% to 14%. Our recent blog illustrates the value older and longer-serving employees place on training
  • Ninety-two per cent of all delegates felt that ‘training like this improves my performance enormously or measurably so’ – which represents a slight decrease from 94% in July 2016

Managers are feeling the least positive about their situation at work since July 2016. The chart below shows their 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 per cent of all delegates feel that things are generally better for them than in July 2016 compared with 64% a year ago. Five per cent feel things are worse in comparison to 7% last year – so it is not that more are feeling things are worse – it’s just that less managers feel things are better and more feel things are the same as last year.

Read June Pulse to compare the results with those of July.

The Management Confidence Indicator graph below which reflects the last 12 months shows the ratings of optimism in the high 60’s and low 70’s, that we’ve seen in recent months and certainly since February this year, have taken a dip. In actual fact, the percentage of delegates feeling that things are better for them than a year ago has dropped to its lowest figure since April 2016.

Just after the referendum in July 2016, the figure was 64%. It is unknown if this fall in confidence is related to external political or economic factors, to internal stress factors like workload, or just pertinent to the organisations that were trained in July, so it will be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of months.