Inclusive People Profession Project

The Inclusive People Profession project aims to enhance UHR’s understanding of diversity and inclusion across the higher education people profession and to identify effective interventions that support a more inclusive profession. 

This project builds on our existing work to understand the demographics of our members, which you can find out about in our “Strength in Diversity” post from earlier in 2026. We have been collecting demographic data on our members for the past couple of years – if you haven’t yet shared your information and would like to, you can easily do this in your UHR member profile.

Current Project Stage 

Stage 1 - Anonymous member survey (NOW OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS UNTIL 13 NOVEMBER 2026)

We’ve just launched our completely anonymous member survey to explore the lived experiences of people professionals from a wide range of backgrounds and with different protected characteristics. We’ll be collecting both quantitative and qualitative data and insights, which we’ll analyse to identify trends and reflections that will shape the next stages of the project.

=> You can access the survey and make a submission here.

Future Project Stages

Stage 2 – Follow-up member survey

A follow-up survey will allow us to ask targeted questions and to collect details of individual members who are interested in supporting this project, either as part of focus groups and interviews or by providing input into interventions that we may decide to implement.

Stage 3 – Focus Groups/Interviews

We will arrange focus groups and/or individual interviews with members, using the insights from Stage 1 and 2 to determine how we do this. 

Stage 4 – Intervention Planning

After data collection & analysis, we will consider what, if any, interventions UHR can design and deliver to support a more inclusive people profession in HE. We aim to present our findings and insights at the UHR Conference in May 2027. Following this we will seek approval from our Exec board on next steps, including any identified interventions.

The aim of all this work is to better understand barriers and enablers that may influence inclusion, career development and progression, and to use the findings to inform meaningful future action. 

We’d love to hear from you! 

You can find the survey here and a single document containing all the questions here. The survey should only take around ten minutes, and there’s only one mandatory question. If you’d like to feed back to us directly, or find out how you can be involved, you can get in touch with Sophie or Emma by email. 

As well as presenting our findings at conference, we’ll be creating a report for UHR members on our outputs, and what our plans are for continuing to champion an inclusive people profession, both now and in the future.

Thanks
The UHR team