Positive trends from this year's Registrant Workforce and Perceptions Survey

It would be easy to get disheartened by the findings from this year’s Registrant Workforce and Perceptions Survey showing declining job satisfaction levels and challenging working conditions persisting. Whilst we continue to report these findings and focus on tackling these issues, this is a time of great opportunity for the sector, so it’s important we celebrate the positive findings in the research and to build on what’s working well.

In the context of rising student numbers, it’s encouraging that new questions this year show altruism as a key driver for joining the profession - this applies throughout the generations. For example, ‘helping people’ was one of the top two motivations for wanting to become an optometrist or dispensing optician, and ‘wanting to help others joining the professions’ was the main driver for becoming a supervisor.

Looking at the findings, interesting and varied workloads are linked to higher job satisfaction, for those with additional qualifications, those involved in the delivery of enhanced services and those acting in a supervisory role. Growing student numbers and the shift in care from hospitals to communities should create opportunities for more registrants to do the things that appear to underpin satisfaction at work.

Businesses can also take pride in the finding that a good working environment was one of the main two reasons registrants felt satisfied at work. This points to the importance of employers embedding a positive, safe and inclusive workplace culture and tackling negative behaviours such as harassment, bullying, abuse and discrimination at work.  

Another positive trend is that the most popular immediate future career plan over the next 12-24 months is to gain additional qualifications and skills. Interestingly those who had already gained additional qualifications were more likely to want to gain more. In terms of access to learning and development, encouragingly nearly three quarters of respondents felt they had opportunities to develop their skills and six in ten felt they could access the right learning and development opportunities when they needed to.

So, what does all this mean? In short, although satisfaction levels have dropped and there are real challenges to address, we still have a workforce motivated to help patients and many registrants who are thriving with interesting and varied workloads, and keen to further develop their skills. In the context of service redesign in all four nations of the UK, these findings offer hope that the sector is well placed to meet the higher expectations that it is being asked to deliver.