{"id":116,"date":"2015-03-06T10:18:18","date_gmt":"2015-03-06T10:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/?p=116"},"modified":"2022-04-13T15:08:21","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T15:08:21","slug":"being-proud-of-your-athena-swan-action-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/being-proud-of-your-athena-swan-action-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Being proud of your Athena SWAN Action Plan&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot of about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ecu.ac.uk\/equality-charter-marks\/athena-swan\/\">Athena SWAN<\/a> Action Plans. Action Plans are often\u00a0the last part of an Athena SWAN application and sometimes we&#8217;re in a bit rush as we write them. However, they are\u00a0a <strong>really important<\/strong> part of the application process.<\/p>\n<p>Let me be honest: I don&#8217;t like Action Plans. I recognise their importance and their usefulness but I don&#8217;t enjoy looking at them! However, I think it&#8217;s important to write the best Action Plan we can and ideally it should be an action plan that everybody can be <strong>proud of and be willing to\u00a0work<\/strong> <strong>with<\/strong> in your School.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cardiff.ac.uk\/colleges\/physical-sciences-engineering\/about-us\/structure\">Juliet Jukes, the HR Business Partner<\/a> at the Cardiff University\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cardiff.ac.uk\/colleges\/physical-sciences-engineering\">College of Physical Sciences\u00a0&amp; Engineering<\/a>\u00a0has organised a College Athena Network\u00a0event today and she has asked me to talk about Action Plans. I will be presenting towards the end of the session so\u00a0I decided that I needed to distil my thoughts into the\u00a0<strong>key points about Action Plans<\/strong>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It\u2019s about YOUR School!<\/li>\n<li>Learn from good practice but&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Have realistic success measures.<\/li>\n<li>Share the workload &#8211; with Senior Staff!<\/li>\n<li>You have three years \u2013 use it all.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The first point is the most important one &#8211; your Action Plan should be <strong>customised to your own School<\/strong> and the challenges faced in that School. There are lots of changes\u00a0that everybody can\u00a0make but the key is to identify the top few challenges (say <strong>three<\/strong>) and focus on those. Ask yourself the question:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\"><strong>What is the most important thing to change?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Staying\u00a0with the 3&#215;3 thought process: what one thing you can change in 3 weeks, in 3 months and in 3 years? I learned this idea from <a href=\"http:\/\/threetimesthree.co.uk\/people.html#janet-wilkinson\">Janet Wilkinson<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/2014\/03\/24\/why-im-an-athena-swan-panelist\/\">I&#8217;m an Athena SWAN assessment panellist<\/a>. A good Action Plan won&#8217;t save a bad application but a bad Action Plan can cost you your Award! As a cautionary tale, one of the Action Plan&#8217;s I&#8217;ve seen looked as if it was <strong>copied<\/strong> from another Department\u00a0in the same University. It was a great Action Plan but didn&#8217;t address the key issues that faced that Department. This did not reflect well on the application.<\/p>\n<p>For more info, I have already\u00a0written a more detailed list of <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/2014\/10\/23\/things-to-consider-for-your-athena-swan-action-plan\/\">things to consider for your Action Plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Other sources of info I have looked at:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cardiff.ac.uk\/humrs\/Athena_swan\/Submission\/sumbission.html\">Cardiff University Athena SWAN application and Action Plan<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.athenaforum.org.uk\/\">Athena Forum<\/a>\u00a0website with a\u00a0\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.athenaforum.org.uk\/media\/1088\/athena-project-review-final-version-web.pdf\">detailed review\u00a0of their activities<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.athenaforum.org.uk\/media\/1086\/athena-project-review-summary-final.pdf\">summary<\/a> is available.<\/li>\n<li>The\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ecu.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/Athena-SWAN-handbook-April-2014-v2.pdf\">Athena SWAN Handbook<\/a>\u00a0has really good advice and should be perused in detail.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I've been thinking a lot of about Athena SWAN Action Plans. Action Plans are often\u00a0the last part of an Athena SWAN application and sometimes we're in a bit rush as [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":80,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-athena-swan"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4tWbY-1S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions\/124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/brennanpincardiff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}