Training Management Skills for First-line Managers : case: company X

Abstract

First-line managers play an important role in a company’s success as they are significantly involved in the day-to-day operations, guiding the employees through certain courses of action to help them accomplish the organizational goals. In order to do so successfully, management skills such as planning, organizing, directing, and controlling are required from every first-line manager. Training programs for first-line managers can be difficult as such managers are a large population in a company, and very diverse in terms of educational backgrounds and working experience (e.g. experience in managerial jobs). Training first-line managers has become a task so mandatory that modern organizations today should pay more attention to.

As a fully foreign-owned life insurer in Vietnam, Company X has such a huge sales force, including as many as 11,000 agents nationwide. Managing such a large number of employees requires especially proper management skills which are still lacking from most first-line managers. This stresses the utmost importance to provide them with training to ensure all the first-line managers possess sufficient and equal management skills. The purpose of this research was to find out the current situation of the first-line managers’ management skills in Company X, to understand the middle management’s expectations of the first-line managers in Company X, concerning their management skills, and to find ways how Company X should organize its management training programs to improve first the first-line managers’ management skills, and then their work performance. The research will be carried out using both the quantitative and the qualitative methods.