Thousands of staff have a profile on the University website, yet many more don’t. Through interviews with staff, the Role of Profiles project sought to find out why, and to establish needs and requirements for profiles. This blog post documents reasons and use cases staff shared for having a University web profile.

The move to EdWeb2 presented an opportunity to review the provision for staff profiles, to establish if staff required a profile on the University website, or if there was a preference to publish online profile content elsewhere, such as in data repositories or on social media platforms.

Throughout March 2025, 40 staff were interviewed about profiles and they provided information from the perspective of those owning a profile (profile owners), those overseeing multiple profiles of colleagues within their School or business unit (profile coordinators), and those searching and using content within profiles (profile consumers).

The interviews shed more light on data already gathered in a survey and through analysis of staff UUN data, and in addition, surfaced many ideas, good practices and helpful considerations about creating, presenting and managing profile content, to feed into recommendations for a future profile provision.

Read more about the Role of Profiles project and its research findings in the related blog posts:

The Role of Profiles: our new project researching needs and potential for online profiles

Staff perspectives on online profiles: findings from our University-wide survey

This blog post presents insights from individual profile holders to describe why they wanted a profile on the University website, and the associated purposes and functions.

Staff valued having an online presence that showed they worked with the University

Most staff interviewed (including those who didn’t have a profile on the University web estate and those who weren’t sure if they had one or not) felt that having the option to publish details about themselves and their work on a part of the University web estate was beneficial. Having this online presence provided them a link, and staff described several instances and scenarios where they would make use of their profile URL:

• Adding it to their email signature
• Sharing it at a conference or adding it to conference presentation slides
• Providing it to students along with other teaching information
• Sharing it on social media
• Using it as proof of status

When I am asked to share a link to me or anything like that, it would only ever really be this site [profile] … Also in my email signature, my name links to this page” – academic staff member, CAHSS

I linked to it [their profile] recently because I was requesting a free book from [publisher] and they wanted to see that I was in fact a member of an academic institution. So I shared it with them” – academic staff member, CMVM

If you work for a really like famous institution like the University of Edinburgh, people want to work with you, partly because you’re the University of Edinburgh” – academic staff member, CSE 

Academic peers, current students, prospective PhD students and industry partners were key audiences for academic staff profiles

Building on why they felt profiles were important, staff described several audience groups they anticipated would use academic staff profiles. Academics themselves recognised that their profiles would be accessed and appraised by fellow academics and potential research collaborators in their field (as they themselves had sought information from academic peers’ profiles in this way).

Assessors for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and for grants and funding bids were another important audience mentioned. Those academics with teaching responsibilities described how current students would use their profiles to find out more about them, perhaps when making course choices.

Staff responsible for handling external queries about the University cited industry partners and the media as audiences for profile content and described how they had used the information in academic staff profiles to connect interested parties with appropriate academic specialists.

Both academic staff owning profiles and professional services staff who had handled and coordinated profile content for their School or business unit described PhD students as one of the main audiences seeking to use academic staff profiles.

Lots of people find supervisors for their PhD through this [academic profiles]. It helps them identify who would be best for their PhD, who they should reach out to” – professional services member,  CMVM

My main stakeholder groups would be other academics in my field, interested PhD students. To a lesser extent, companies that I want to work with” – academic staff member, CAHSS

Unlike other sectors, academia is quite public about what they do. There’s transparency – I can see what they [other academics] publish, what they teach, how many students they have, how much funding they have” – academic staff member, CSE

Profiles helped staff find colleagues internally but privacy was a concern for some

Reflecting on their own profiles, but also on the profiles of other staff, both professional services and academic staff talked about the value of profiles as a way to find information about others working for the University, in addition to using sources like organisational charts, or information from staff databases like People and Money. In some cases this was to understand more about roles and responsibilities, in others to find practical contact details or to make service requests.

I’ll maybe just look people up to see what room they are in or if there is a phone number available – professional staff member, CSE

People … want to reach out and say ‘you’re having similar problems that we’re having, …is there any knowledge-sharing we can do?’” – professional staff member, ISG

While staff recognised the value of profiles to support this purpose, several expressed concern at profiles being published on the University website and therefore being open to everyone.

If it’s [a profile] going to go to the wider world, it’s kind of not as appealing” – academic staff member, CMVM

I don’t want anyone to be able to basically type in my name, University of Edinburgh and then find my staff profile and they have the building where I work in my office, And maybe even a picture” – professional services staff member, CSE

University profiles often existed alongside other sources of online profile content

Tallying with the results of a staff survey, most interviewees had profile content in places other than the University web estate and it was interesting to explore how their University website profile ranked in importance compared to other sources. Some staff said their University profile was their ‘primary’ profile, in others, staff had multiple profiles – for example, profiles on separate School websites, websites for research institutes or groups and their own personal websites and they used these separately, for different purposes.

Most interviewees had a social media presence (including LinkedIn, BlueSky or X), and some directed people wishing to get in contact with them to their LinkedIn page rather than to their University website profile.

If I’m at a …conference as an Edinburgh academic, I would share my staff profile, but if I’m at a conference because I am looking for a job … I’ll use my LinkedIn account as that has a complete picture of my experience” – academic staff member, CSE

Sometimes I use the profile on my research centre website, … when I want to push people to look at the activities of the centre” – academic staff member, CAHSS

A staff profile gives me legitimacy. There’s a lot of stuff on LinkedIn that isn’t real” – professional services staff member, USG

I would usually include at the end of a presentation a QR code for my LinkedIn profile, not for this page [their profile] because this is just a static page and it doesn’t really give the opportunity to connect with other people, … to add people to your network for example” – academic staff member, CMVM.

Some staff used their profile to direct audiences to content published elsewhere

Staff shared numerous locations and platforms which held content documenting their roles, responsibilities, activities and achievements. These included the following:

• PURE and Research Explorer
• ResearchGate
• IEEE Xplore
• Scopus
• PubMed
• Github

• Academia.edu

• arXiv
• ORCID
• Google Scholar
• Course information on the Degree Regulations and Programmes of Study (DRPS)

In some cases, integrations were in place which pulled content from external sources to render on the profile page. This was desirable for some, and they described previously having this in place for PURE. In other cases, however, staff used their University web profile as a place to collate multiple external sources under the one umbrella, by including direct links to their PURE profiles (and other external sources of profile data, such as those listed above). This offered them more flexibility around which profiles sources to include as they could choose to change the links at will, depending on what they wanted their profile to portray.

I want to customise … [my] page to be ..linkable to things…that are most important to [me]. So for me it would be my research centre…[name of centre]. It’d be really nice to be able to have a button on my page and that would then also signify that that’s one of my key affiliations” –  academic staff member, CAHSS

I have it [profile] on my email so that people, … if they get an email from me and they want to know more about me, it takes them there. I wanted it [profile] to be a place where it can give people a quick overview of what I do” – academic staff member – CSE

I try and use my University one [profile] as a catch-all so it’s like for people who are … interested in collaborations who want to see what I do, but also then for students who are thinking about final-year research projects. …I guess [a] one-stop place to find that information relatively quickly” – academic staff member – CSE

Purposes and functions of staff profiles changed for staff over their careers

Referring to their individual profiles, many staff interviewed commented that they were out-of-date, and it was clear that at any point in time an individual’s profile may be accurate, but throughout their working association with the University it would need to change to continue to reflect them correctly. Reflecting on previous stages of their careers, and thinking ahead to the future, several staff described how the way they used their profiles had changed and were likely to change going forwards.

I think it’s important as an early career person to have an area where you can put your stamp on something … related to the institute you’re at” – academic staff member, CSE

It [my profile] is to note exactly who I’m associated with within the School, so the fact that I provide admin support to the three institutes that are listed. … [there is information about] my former role… plus my new role as well – professional services staff member, CSE

Right now my audience is less – once I become lecturer or professor or once I have funding then there will be some prospective PhD or Masters student who want to join my research group then scope [of my profile] will definitely be increased” – academic staff member, CSE

It’s all out of date, …the projects, the teaching, the PhD… it’s like a snapshot in time, … like, wow, I remember doing that. People know who I am internationally so I don’t need this [now] “- academic staff member, CAHSS

In some cases team profiles were more important than individual ones

Recognising the use case of profiles to find colleagues across the University, some staff had grouped profiles together into teams or functions to facilitate people scanning and searching them. In some cases, this was done manually, in others this had been achieved dynamically, directing to individual profiles or contact cards published elsewhere as source content. Depending on their audiences and their associated needs, some teams had made the decision to publish team details internally (for example on Sharepoint) rather than on externally facing websites, and selectively publishing details of individuals to encourage questions and requests to be triaged in the desired way, for example, to  be sent to a central enquiry-management system.

We’ve aimed our site more at internal audiences. We want colleagues to know about our department and the work that we do, what each of our teams does and who are in those teams. That’s where we’ve got contact cards, on our teams page… Increasingly a team page will link to a Sharepoint. People are more accustomed to that now” – professional staff member, USG

“The purpose of these pages [grouping contact cards of different team members] is that an academic can quickly look down, find their College, then find their area and… find the person who works with their institute or School to help them” – professional services member, CSG

In conclusion: staff wanted the option of having a profile for varied reasons

The interviews revealed that an online profile provision was a desirable prospect for staff, and that staff made use of profiles to support different purposes and functions, which could change over time. Further information also emerged about multiple perspectives on staff profiles, the content staff chose to include in their profiles, how profiles were managed in end-to-end processes, and reasons why some staff groups made more use of profiles than others.

A series of additional blog posts documents these findings:

Profile owners, coordinators and consumers: Making sense of multiple perspectives on staff profiles

Keeping profiles up-to-date: Practices and processes for managing the end-to-end lifecycle of staff profiles

Representing myself online: Staff preferences and practices for content within online profiles