Research for the Role of Profiles project found that many University staff profiles were out-of-date. Interviewing staff about their current processes for creating, updating and deleting profiles identified the work required to keep profiles current, and surfaced areas of good practice as well as opportunities for improvement.

Analysis of UUN data associated with University staff profiles showed 19% of published profiles belonged to staff who had left the University. In the course of interviewing 40 staff about profiles, most said content in their own profiles or those of colleagues was outdated.

Read more about the Role of Profiles project and the associated analysis of UUN data and profiles in this blog post:

Current usage of University staff profiles: Initial insights from The Role of Profiles project

Once published, web content requires ongoing attention to keep it up-to-date, and the content in staff profiles is no exception – it was not a question of publishing and forgetting. Understanding how profile content was managed and looked after from the point of profile creation to the point of deletion (when a staff member was no longer associated with the University) helped identify reasons why profile content became outdated, and also helped pinpoint typical points in an end-to-end profile lifecycle where this occurred, therefore highlighting ways to prevent this happening.

From creation through to deletion – stages of a typical profile lifecycle

Analysis of interview data obtained from staff revealed the different ways profiles were created, maintained, promoted and ultimately deleted, and the associated pros, cons and resource requirements. Some staff spoke about their own profiles, others provided perspectives of coordinating or looking after the profiles of colleagues.

Profile creation: Getting a profile in the first place

As soon as a staff profile was created, there was a need to maintain the content within it. Understanding the different ways profiles began was therefore important to appreciate how staff engaged with their profiles from the start, and the factors affecting how they went on to use them.

Most staff owning a profile said it had been set up for them

A recurring theme among staff with a profile was that it had been created for them when they began new roles (either when they joined the University, or when they moved between teams internally). Having it set up for them automatically meant they did not have to initiate it themselves, although some were unsure what to do with it once it was set up.

I don’t remember being asked about a staff profile until I was managed by somebody for whom that kind of thing was quite important – professional services staff member, CSE

After the initial set up, I went in myself to kind of pad bits in and tidy bits up. We were given instructions to go and edit as we wanted to – academic staff member, CSE

For some professional services staff an internal profile was more appropriate than a public-facing one

Before setting up an externally facing profile, several professional services staff had questioned whether this was necessary and if single point of enquiry (such as a contact form) or an internal presence (for example on a Sharepoint) was a better option.

We have actually tried to minimise our visibility to an extent because we wanted to make sure that [audiences] go to the right source of information through the contact forms– professional services staff member, USG

“We moved to Sharepoint… We’ve moved away from having EdWeb profiles for everyone. In some cases people prefer to be contacted via a service request or via a shared inbox. Profiles can act counter to that, because they encourage colleagues to contact an individual. The task is more likely to be ‘Who is the right person who can help me?’ (vs ‘How do I find out what this particular person does?’) – professional services staff member, USG

Several Schools and units included profile set-up in their staff induction process

Echoing what those owning profiles had said, several staff in professional services roles described their processes to create profiles for new team members.

In some cases, profiles were set up for all staff by default

Some Schools and departments built in profile creation as part of the induction process for staff. Profiles were created for new staff when they joined.

Once I’ve created a profile for somebody, … [I will contact them to say] ‘Welcome to the [name of School] your profile’s now live’.. we’ll give them their URL so they can find it. ‘If you would like to edit your profile there’s instructions on the staff intranet – professional services member, CAHSS.

In others, staff expressing an interest in profiles were given guidance to set one up themselves

Acknowledging that some staff may not wish to have a profile, other units had taken an ‘opt-in’ approach, whereby only those showing an interest were given guidance to set one up themselves.

When people join us, this is one of the steps they are asked to complete [set up a profile]. If they’re comfortable with it, obviously. That’s the process we have in place – only for people who express interest, we share this [guidance] with them – professional services staff member, USG

We’re not creating EdWeb profiles on behalf of anyone. We can tell them how to do it – professional services staff member, CSE

Some Schools used a templated approach to set up profiles for staff

Staff from some Schools described creating profiles using a template with pre-defined fields of information that had previously been agreed at School or department level. The consistent structure of these templates enabled collections of profiles to be grouped by category and in some cases, also made them filterable. This required administrative work from the professional services staff coordinating the School profiles and offered little flexibility to the profile owners.

Depending on where staff sit …they’ll show up on different pages when people do staff searches …someone may think, well I’m a Director of programmes or I was a Director of programmes. Those things all need to be marked off by ourselves [professional services staff looking after the School profiles] so they appear in the right sections on our website – professional services staff member, CAHSS

Some new profiles were set up to include baseline content from other sources

In some areas, new profiles were made and populated with data from centralised databases such as the active directory or People and Money. This saved manual input of data, and paved the way for maintaining profile content when things changed, however, in some cases it meant that amendments to certain fields could only be made at the external data source.

We’ve got a back database that was created in the School, we put in information such as their name and we can link their university staff profile if they’ve got one….then if somebody does change job then it all filters through – professional services staff member, CSE

[the guidance says] ‘Please note you cannot amend your name, your job title or email address… if you wish to do this, you must contact HR’ – professional services staff member, CAHSS

Once set up, some Schools aggregated individual profiles into lists

Some Schools wanted to group the details of multiple staff together (for example as a list on a page or in a directory). Depending on their technical set-up they used different approaches to achieve this. Some Schools used the fields within their templated profiles to sort and categorise them into dynamic displays – for example, to show a list of all staff associated with a particular research institute or subject area. Other Schools used a more manual approach to achieve these types of lists.

We list the staff profiles on our website and they are very important to our academic community and anybody else involved in research. On our staff list we link to the profile but we also have a column for email addresses. ..it’s a completely manual process – professional services staff member, CAHSS

Profile maintenance: Keeping profiles updated

Once profiles had been created, they required ongoing maintenance on an individual level to keep them up-to-date. If they had been aggregated into lists or overviews, these required separate maintenance.  Staff described instances which would prompt them to update their individual profiles – the sections they needed to update most frequently and other aspects they looked after. Those who had experience of grouping profiles together described their processes to keep the contents of these lists up-to-date. Staff also shared details of any support and guidance available in their areas relating to profile maintenance and shared their individual experiences of making edits and updates to them using the interface.

Changes to roles, interests and achievements prompted staff to update their individual profiles

Academic staff and professional services staff described slightly different sets of circumstances that would lead them to make updates to the content within their profiles.

Publications, conferences and career milestones caused academic staff to update their profiles

Academic staff said they did not update their profiles following a regular cadence, instead they mentioned several occurrences that would make them think about changing the content within their profiles. These included:

• Publishing a paper
• Speaking at a conference
• Applying for grants or funding
• Preparing for a promotions panel or annual review

In some cases, staff were prompted to review their profiles according to the norms of the School or business unit they worked in, whereas others said they were left to update them as and when they wanted to.

I can edit my own profile, and I’m expected to, if I’ve got a new academic publication. Not everyone does” – academic staff member, CAHSS

Our director went through and asked everyone to make sure that they had their red pages semi up-to-date – academic staff member, CMVM

I went for promotion last year and so … I had to update it then. I tend to only update it if there’s a change in my role at the University” – academic staff member, CAHSS

Professional services staff only tended to update their profiles if they changed jobs

Those working in professional services described fewer instances when they would update their profiles than academic staff.

One of the reasons I had to update it was I had changed job in May and changed my job title – professional services staff member, USG

If you haven’t changed role substantially then [you don’t update it] it’s probably the smaller-scale changes that you forget to put in but are actually relevant  – professional services staff member, USG

‘PhD supervision status’ was a section multiple academics wanted to change

Reflecting on the parts of their profiles that needed updating, several staff wanted to update the ‘Open to PhD supervision enquiries’ part of the Teaching & PhD supervision section, to ensure they were providing accurate information to prospective PhD students.

Rather than going ‘Open to PhD supervision enquiries?’ and I just put ‘No’, I’d rather it not be there at all – academic staff member, CMVM

I might change that [‘Open to PhD supervision enquiries’] because I am getting fed up of people emailing me with really utterly awful ideas for PhDs – academic staff member, CAHSS

Checking publication content in PURE was a common updating task for academics

Several academic staff referred to a technological functionality previously available in EdWeb which had automatically pulled through publications to profiles from PURE (treating PURE as the ‘golden copy’). This had worked intermittently but had required effort from academics to make sure the data was in the correct format in PURE to be pulled through. One School had implemented a new way to display content from PURE in their (non EdWeb) site which also required staff to set up PURE in a certain way to make sure the integration worked.

I put something in, I’ve got a publication but it seems to have not been accepted. I don’t know what they’re doing at the Research Explorer level…so I would have to go back to PURE and check on what the status was – academic staff member, CMVM

It [a person’s profile] would show a list of their top five research highlights if [the person] has created these research highlights within PURE – professional services staff member, CAHSS

Some areas provided guidelines and instructions to encourage staff to look after profile content

To try and achieve a good proportion of up-to-date profiles for the staff in their remit, several Schools and departments had produced guidance for staff in intranets, wikis and Sharepoints, including conventions to follow, rules of what to include and exclude, when to update and other best practices. Some Schools provided detailed guidance for certain aspects of updating profiles, for example how to write to appeal to prospective PhD students or how to prepare research information in PURE, and in some cases, Schools rolled out the guidance and communicated it staff through training sessions, in an extra effort to engage staff to look after their profiles.

I found … generic guidelines online and I tried to simplify it for people because they found it quite extensive, quite long, so we simplified it and shared it with colleagues who wanted to set up a profile, so we have something in place – professional service staff member, USG

We had a … training session about how to raise your profile or how to improve your profile. So I did a bit more work on it at that point – academic staff member, CAHSS

We’ve created a brief little document of how to do it and what we expected: Please make sure you’ve got publications for the last couple of years. Please make sure you’ve got keywords – professional services staff member, CSE

Some staff asked for help updating their profiles, some staff wanted access to do it for others and some updated themselves

Emphasising the need some staff had to be supported with their profiles, several professional services staff described being asked by colleagues to update profiles belonging to colleagues but being prevented from doing so due to access permissions. In other Schools, professional services staff had access to update others’ profiles where necessary. In other cases, staff took ownership to update and maintain their own profiles.

People and colleagues in my department come to me and say, can you update my profile? And I can’t do that unless I asked for access specifically – professional services staff member, USG

We needed to update everybody’s location and business address. Rather than explaining to people how to look into the CMS and fiddle around with all the settings I though it was easier just to spend a chunk of time doing it manually ourselves – professional services staff member, CMVM

I do it myself [update their profile] I think it would be hard for someone else to do it – academic staff member, CAHSS

Many staff said unfamiliarity with the web platform prevented them from updating their profiles

Staff recognised the need to keep their profiles updated, but since they did this intermittently, they said they often struggled to remember how to log into EdWeb and to use it to edit their profile content. These sentiments were echoed by staff who had encouraged and helped colleagues to update their profile content.

I think it’s a navigation thing, getting to the page to then make the updates is something we find a lot of staff have problems with – professional services staff member, CSE

Some of them find it really easy and then they can just update all of it and then they forget to press publish. Some of them can’t find where their profile is and where to navigate through – professional services staff member, CAHSS

I haven’t been able to add projects [to my profile] I mean maybe I should have added those. Maybe that’s me – academic staff member, CAHSS

I really struggled to work out where the login [to EdWeb] was. I’ve now memorised that you scroll to the bottom of the page  – professional services staff member, USG

Profile deletion: Removing profiles when staff had left

Connected to the processes to maintain profile content were mechanisms to delete profiles when staff were no longer associated with the University. This related to individual profiles as well as lists of multiple profiles.

Some professional services staff took responsibility for removing old profiles

Several professional services staff spent time making sure the profiles in their area were maintained and up-to-date. They described various ways they tried to keep on top of profiles.

If I find people have moved on within the University, I’ll just drop the person an email …because a lot of people forget and it’s only when you’re scrolling through something you think ‘Oh that person’s still on ours [website]– professional services staff member, CSE

If someone leaves as far as I understand, they’re technically meant to unpublish their profile. Obviously if they don’t do that their profile is still public on the website and then I have to send an email to IS to go ahead and get access to take it down which is a bit complicated” – professional services staff member, CAHSS

Staff wanted automation to remove profiles of ex-staff members from lists

Professional services staff who oversaw profile content for their area described difficulties in ensuring profile lists were up-to-date when staff changes happened. Several staff described a previously available technical function which linked staff profiles with UUNs so that when a UUN became defunct, the associated profile was automatically deleted and also removed from any lists it appeared in. Since this functionality was no longer available, staff had the option of creating and implementing a technical solution themselves or updating lists of profiles manually in the light of staff changes.

[We want to be able] to programmatically generate the list [of profiles] but we can’t do that because it is all hidden inside EdWeb2. If we have a UUN of a staff member or their name or anything else about them, we cannot predict the URL of their profile from that so we’re currently stuck with a horrible [manual] process – professional services staff member, CAHSS

In conclusion: Keeping profiles up-to-date required effort from profile owners and coordinators from creation onwards

Depending on the set-up in their School or business area, staff described various approaches to achieving the stages of the profile content lifecycle: creating, maintaining and deleting profile content. Each stage of the lifecycle required work, both from those owning the profiles and others coordinating profile content for their area and it was clear to understand how a lack of awareness and limited resource could result in scenarios where profiles went out-of-date.

Automated processes could help ensure stages of the lifecycle occurred, but these automations also required maintenance and resource from appropriately skilled technical staff to keep them running and check they continued to function. Automations were also of limited use to prompt staff to update their profiles since the instances when staff needed to make changes to their profiles were very context and individual specific.

Identifying whether externally facing profiles were required or not before creating them (instead of creating by default) was a critical part of the lifecycle, as this could curb the creation of profiles for staff members who did not need them and would not update them. Guidance and support also played a part in helping staff learn how and why to update their profiles. Removing profiles when staff members had left often fell to those coordinating profiles since it was not a specific task required to be completed at the point of leaving the University.