WOWS (wellbeing of older workers and students) group
Published: 19 October 2022
The newly-named WOWS (wellbeing of older workers AND students) group chairs, Nicola McMeekin and Elaine Hindle, reflect on a quiet but productive year, and future plans to help colleagues aged 50+ negotiate challenges and move forward, in whichever ways work best for them
The newly-named WOWS (wellbeing of older workers AND students) group chairs, Nicola McMeekin and Elaine Hindle, reflect on a quiet but productive year, and future plans to help the colleagues aged 50+ negotiate challenges and move forward, in whichever ways work best for them.
We have had a quiet 2022 in the WOW group after a hectic 3 to 4 years after the group’s inception in 2018.
Following interest in our group after the launch of our online toolkit last summer, interest wider than SHW, we have set up a Teams group for older workers and students across the whole university. We currently have 36 members, anyone is welcome to join, you don’t have to be older!
We are starting to plan our next piece of work – the career journey. We believe that many careers are not linear – perhaps particularly for older workers with sandwich/club sandwich caring responsibilities and health issues. People may want to decrease hours to accommodate caring responsibilities, but also choose to increase hours again as caring responsibilities lessen.
Finally, to be inclusive we are making it clear that the WOW group welcomes students in the SHW and we are changing our name to the "Wellbeing of Older Workers and Students" or WOWS for short.
Nicola McMeekin and Elaine Hindle
Chairs of SHW Athena Swan WOWS group
First published: 19 October 2022
