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Part 2: Happy planners - but only just

Published on: 12 Apr 2019

Happy face  [square]More than half of planners are happy with pay, conditions and opportunities for development – but a significant minority register dissatisfaction in The Planner’s 2018-19 Careers Survey, reports Simon Wicks. 

Public versus private

When we compared the responses of people who identified as either public or private sector planners, we found some marked differences between the sectors:

• Salary: 50% of public sector workers believed they were underpaid compared with only 28% of private sector workers.

• Development: 59% of public sector planners said their employer provided them with good opportunities for development; 41% said they did not. By comparison, 81% of private sector planners were happy with their opportunities, 19% were not.

• Career progress: Among public sector planners, 51% were happy with how they are developing as a planner; 22% were concerned that they would not achieve what they set out to do; 14% said they could see no long-term future in the profession. By comparison, 67% of private sector planners said they were happy; 15% were concerned, and just 6% saw no future in the profession.  

• Value: 51% of public sector planners added that they felt their team or department was valued by their organisation, and 32% said they felt it was not. By comparison, 69% of private sector planners said they felt that their team is valued and just 9% said they did not.

• Resources: Only 31% of public sector planners felt their team or department had the resources it needed to deliver its goals. More than twice the percentage of private sector planners – 71% – thought they had the required resources.

One respondent explicitly linked the levels of dissatisfaction in the public sector with government policy since 2010, saying: “The team is much smaller than it was prior to austerity. The amount of work has increased since then and therefore there is an element of being under-resourced and this does affect the speed of delivery.”

Download The Planner's Careers Survey

A PDF of the full careers survey report can be downloaded here (registration required). We explore some of the topic in more detail in the 2019 February issue of The Planner.

Simon Wicks is deputy editor of The Planner