Charting Our Path Forward: A Vision for Academic Excellence
The University of Washington stands at a pivotal moment in higher education. As we navigate an era of unprecedented change—from evolving pedagogical approaches to shifting workforce dynamics—our academic personnel and faculty remain the cornerstone of our institution’s mission to advance knowledge and transform lives.
The Office for Academic Personnel and Faculty (APF) exists at the heart of this transformation, serving as both catalyst and champion for the remarkable individuals who drive discovery, innovation, and learning across our campuses. This strategic plan for 2025-2030 represents our commitment to not merely adapt to change, but to anticipate it, shape it, and harness it for the benefit of our entire academic community.
Our Shared Purpose
Our purpose is clear yet profound: to engage, elevate, and support a thriving community of academic professionals. This isn’t simply about managing processes or maintaining systems—it’s about fostering an environment where every faculty member, researcher, librarian, and academic professional can reach their fullest potential throughout their career journey.
The Road Ahead
Over the next five years, we will focus our efforts on three interconnected goals that form the foundation of our vision:
GOAL 1
Foster and Provide Professional Development
We will create comprehensive pathways for growth that meet academics where they are in their careers and prepare them for success.
Foster and provide professional development for academic personnel and faculty
- Invest time and resources in academic personnel and faculty
- Ensure an ecosystem and working climate for academic personnel and faculty that fosters belonging and wellbeing
- Invest time and resources in academic leaders
- Serve as the central resource, point of contact, and coordinator for academic personnel and faculty development in the UW ecosystem
Imperatives
- We must have buy-in, support, and engagement among key stakeholders
- We must have dedicated and sustained resources to facilitate professional and leadership development
- We must have the right tools and technology to support professional and leadership development
- We must foster a culture of continuous learning
- We must have strong campus-wide collaboration, partnerships, and connections
- We must facilitate and support thoughtful, timely, and relevant professional development programs across the university
Strategies and Tactics
- Provide robust professional and leadership development opportunities
- Reassess/refocus/re-prioritize initiatives and programs that no longer serve the needs of UW
- Conduct an inventory of existing professional development programs and services
- Look for opportunities to reduce duplicative efforts for non-specialized programs
(e.g., onboarding) - Reallocate resources accordingly
- Ensure robust leadership development programming
- Support emerging academic leaders through structured leadership development programs tailored for faculty assuming administrative roles
- Develop leadership development programs for Chairs/Directors/Division Heads/ Deans
- Engage experts in conflict resolution
- Develop conflict engagement resolution training for faculty and academic leaders
- Facilitate train-the-trainer support for leadership development programs when possible
- Cultivate leadership development programming for emerging leaders
- Develop onboarding programs for new academic leaders
- Develop and offer robust training for search committees and faculty evaluation
committees (e.g. Leverage the Faculty Hiring Toolkit documents)
- Continue to expand mentorship and peer coaching programs
- Develop incentives to encourage mentors to participate in programs
- Create a climate of mentorship and coaching
- Encourage academic leaders to reinforce and model a culture of continuous learning and coaching
- Assess options for coaching support for academic personnel and faculty (e.g. internal coaches, external coaches, a hybrid model, and peer coaching)
- Establish a structure of career development programming that aligns with career stages (early career, mid-career, advanced career) and career tracks (e.g., librarian track, research track, teaching track, tenure track, etc.)
- Identify gaps in career stage or career track professional development programming and develop opportunities to address those gaps
- Tie into existing career development programming such as promotion workshops,
affinity and community groups, and other activities - Connect schools, colleges, and campuses with each other to share information and learn from each other
- Reassess/refocus/re-prioritize initiatives and programs that no longer serve the needs of UW
- Proactively communicate, educate, and engage with units to respond to their professional and leadership development needs
- Position APF as the first point of contact and connector for academic personnel and
faculty professional and leadership development information- Develop an effective communication strategy for APF career arc offerings
- Conduct an inventory of academic personnel and faculty professional development resources and events across UW
- Maintain up to date professional development resources, events, and other content on the APF website
- Engage in outreach to communicate APF’s centralize space for professional and leadership development information
- Create resources and guides on how to create academic personnel and faculty professional development programs at the unit level (department, college, school, campus, etc.)
- Help enhance and support existing programs across campus
- Cross-promote and aggregate content related to existing programs across campus
- Engage in more deliberate storytelling to showcase localized work and successes
- Leverage various communication channels
- Communicate best practices for running events to reduce the need to re-invent the wheel when there are existing programs that have been successful
- Integrate APF resources with existing programs across campus where appropriate
- Clarify UWHR and APF’s domains with respect to academic personnel and faculty professional and leadership development
- Create a communication and outreach plan
- Focus communications around “who” and “why”
- Identify the appropriate tools to support purposeful communication
- Target and tailor communications based on career stages, career tracks, units, and type of programming (e.g., career arc programming, search committee programming, leadership development programming)
- Strengthen communication data gathering infrastructure (e.g., identifying audiences, maintaining listservs, website, etc.)
- Review the current data skills and competencies related to data analytics
- Enhance our data analytics/data interpretation capacities
- Develop a structure to easily and quickly access relevant data to support quick decision-making on academic personnel and faculty policymaking
- Create additional capacity for data reporting, data quality, and consistency of data across systems
- Position APF as the first point of contact and connector for academic personnel and
GOAL 2
Serve as a Trusted Partner
We will build bridges of understanding and collaboration, ensuring that our processes are transparent and relationships are rooted in trust.
Serve as a trusted partner to the UW community
- Continue to build and maintain strong collaborative relationships with the UW community
- Enhance the reputation of APF
- Increase awareness and promote understanding of APF services and offerings
- Improve transparency and clarity by ensuring that academic processes, policies, and guidelines are accessible, clear, and understood
Imperatives
- We must have transparency and accessibility of processes
- We must have clearly defined metrics and data sources to guide our investments and efforts
- We must have identified people who can help interpret and navigate
processes, policies, guidelines, practices, and cultures - We must proactively educate the UW community on the work being done in
our office and the services and supports we provide - We must provide and promote high quality and visible work to the UW community
- We must support the infrastructure, retention, and development of APF staff
to maintain strong relationships and a culture of support - We must establish and leverage existing effective communication channels
- We must have lead time and planning for all communications efforts
- We must be able to be honest and transparent in our conversations which enable us to work towards co-creative resolutions
- We must ensure our processes, policies, and guidelines are simple, accessible, and easily understood
- We must identify clear and agreed upon interpretative authorities for relevant sources of law to ensure consistency in application across UW
Strategies and Tactics
- Streamline administrative processes
- Regularly audit processes to identify and reduce unnecessary steps, redundancies, and complexity
- Create standardized templates and resources for routine procedures
- Develop best practices for streamlining academic personnel and faculty-related processes,
ensuring consistency and efficiency across units
- Regularly review and update academic personnel and faculty policies to ensure clarity and accessibility
- Create consensus around the appropriate balance between risk aversion and customer service
- Foster a culture of trust and empowerment within APF
- Support informed decision-making
- Ensure consistency in the application of processes, policies, and practice suggestions
- Create clarity around authority and what should be determined locally (at the unit level) vs. centrally (at the Provost/APF level)
- Internally define “guidelines” and “suggestions” and publish the definitions for audiences
- Clearly communicate where there is flexibility (what are the guidelines or suggestions vs. what is a rule)
- Provide clarity around the source of decisions (e.g., Faculty Code, University policy, Executive Orders, state and federal law, past precedence, practice, etc.)
- Maintain detailed documentation of policy interpretation and precedence
- Establish a mechanism for regularly monitoring and updating documentation and include a revision date when updating
- Develop an FAQ reference document of commonly asked questions
- Ensure APF staff understand changes before they are published externally
- Encourage open communication and discussion within APF to leverage expertise within
APF, keep AFP staff updated and informed, and ensure clear understanding
- Leverage technology to optimize the implementation of processes and procedures
- Use technology to alleviate the work of administrators and ensure there is clean and consistent academic personnel and faculty-related data
- Automate workflow system where possible
- Enhance user experience
- Provide excellent customer service by anticipating needs and effectively communicating
information- Identify agreed-upon customer service standards and expectations (communication,
timeliness, and other cultural norms of the office - Create service level agreements for response times, communicate expectations, and
ensure units are staffed appropriately to meet the expectations - Improve access to academic personnel policies and procedures through an enhanced digital presence and user-friendly communication strategies
- Identify agreed-upon customer service standards and expectations (communication,
- Rebrand APF by communicating, celebrating, and showcasing important milestones and accomplishments (e.g., the number of promotions, 100,000th ticket, etc.)
- Establish a content strategy, including defining a mechanism for gathering stories
- Review and evaluate existing communications channels and build new communications channels as needed
- Ensure a robust APF infrastructure
GOAL 3
Anticipate and Meet Dynamic Needs
We will stay ahead of the curve, proactively identifying emerging challenges and opportunities to ensure our support evolves with academic needs.
Anticipate and meet the dynamic needs of academic personnel and faculty
- Offer updated services to support the career arc of academic personnel and
faculty - Ensure APF is a thriving and well-resourced unit
- Identify and enhance tools and resources for campus partner engagement
- Identify, reduce, and remove barriers to academic personnel and faculty success
Imperatives
- We must have the appropriate resources (personnel, financial, technological) within APF to provide support and services to our academic personnel and faculty
- We must have a supportive, collaborative, and empowering work environment and professional development opportunities within APF
- We must clearly define and communicate about the career arc of academic personnel and faculty and identify differing needs and desires within each phase of the career arc
- We must identify the support and services that our leadership, academic personnel, and faculty want and need (on an ongoing basis)
- We must continuously engage with our stakeholders to ensure we understand their evolving needs
- We must maintain a forward-looking approach to anticipate future academic workplace trends and prepare accordingly
Strategies and Tactics
- Clarify APF’s scope and priorities
- Develop an approach and mechanism to continuously identify and anticipate the evolving needs of our stakeholders
- Anticipate evolving needs and create proactive approaches to identify future academic workforce needs
- Ensure APF is represented in different groups, meetings, or other forums to connect across campus
- Partner with other institutions to share best practices and information (AAU, Big 10 Alliance, etc.)
- Create internal partnerships across UW campuses (e.g., FAAC)
- Identify and address systemic administrative barriers hindering academic personnel and faculty success, ensuring equitable access to resources and opportunities
- Align APF resources, professional development activities, and services with the dynamic needs of academic personnel and faculty
- Evaluate APF programs and services to enable continuous improvement
- Identify metrics to evaluate outcomes and impact
- Collect quantitative and qualitative feedback
- Capture input from sources internal to APF and external to APF
- Identify, evaluate, and leverage technologies and tools to ensure a positive user experience both inside and outside of APF
- Secure and allocate resources (staffing, tools, technology) to support the future model and structure
- Offer ongoing support to APF staff to promote their career development and success
- Establish professional development plans to support future services
- Regularly communicate and socialize changes and updates to APF support, services, and programs to enable awareness, uptake, and resonance
A Commitment to Excellence
This strategic plan is more than a roadmap—it’s a promise. A promise to every early-career researcher seeking guidance, every mid-career faculty member navigating new challenges, and every seasoned academic leader shaping the future of their field. It’s our commitment to creating an ecosystem where innovation flourishes, barriers dissolve, and every member of our academic community has the support they need to thrive.
As we embark on this journey together, we invite you to see this not as APF’s strategic plan, but as our collective blueprint for building a stronger, more vibrant University of Washington—one that truly lives up to its potential as a beacon of academic excellence and inclusive community.
The future of higher education is being written today. Let’s write it together.