School of Health & Wellbeing

Promotions myth-busting, an expanded remit, and training for line managers – find out more about the activities and recent achievements of the IHW Athena Swan career progression working group (formerly the Athena Swan promotions, regrading and reward and recognition group).

Our group has been working hard to raise knowledge and awareness of issues around career progression. More recently, we have expanded our remit, in collaboration with the Athena Swan professional services working group, to include regrading for professional staff.

Since March 2020, due to COVID-19, staff and students have had to rapidly adapt to working from home and getting to grips with many new challenges. Since then, there has been much consultation on how COVID-19 has impacted processes and people and how this is being mitigated in relation to promotions, reward and recognition and regrading. We are raising awareness in a number of ways, including through a "myth busting" campaign, where we identified some common themes and issues around promotion (including funding end dates, part time contracts, PhDs, COVID-19 and more), that staff reported a lack of clarity on. For example, does working part-time count against you for seeking promotion? The answer to this, and many other common questions/queries, that can cause confusion around promotions can be found on our new myth buster webpage.

We have expanded our myth busting campaign by developing training for line managers to be completed every two years in Moodle . This is to help line managers effectively support staff to identify when they are ready to apply for promotion and avoid common myths that may put staff off applying for promotion when they are eligible.

We run a workshop annually for staff considering applying for promotion. The next session is on 29 October 2021. If you are considering applying for promotion within the next few years, this workshop is an excellent opportunity to hear about the processes and criteria for promotion for IHW staff. This will include discussion of the COVID-19 effects and how to evidence the impact of this on our work in applications. The workshop is also an opportunity for staff to ask key questions to senior staff with experience of promotions committees who are presenting and seek advice and guidance. There have been some changes in the past year in relation to promotions from Grade 6 to Grade 7, to make the process more streamlined, which will be discussed. 

Some useful resources that are on hand to support staff through the promotions process include a video on how to approach your application for promotion and examples of successful promotion applications from staff who have given their permission for us to share (available on request from ihwadmin@glasgow.ac.uk). 

For more information about what we do, please check out our group webpage. A wealth of current information about Pay, Performance and Reward can also be found on the UofG website. 

Group chairs

Laura Hughes-McCormack
Research Associate (Scottish Learning Disabilities Observatory)
Laura.Hughes-Mccormack@glasgow.ac.uk 

Arlene McGarty
Research Fellow (Mental Health and Wellbeing) 
Arlene.McGarty@glasgow.ac.uk 

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First published: 14 October 2021