At Affinity Health at Work, we are committed to advancing the wellbeing profession and creating development and career growth opportunities for those working in this space. As we continue to refine and expand our offerings, we recognised the importance of gaining deeper insights into what wellbeing professionals truly need and value in their professional development.

That's why, in 2024, we hosted roundtable discussions with wellbeing professionals to explore their training and development needs. These conversations proved incredibly insightful, but the findings were not what we expected. Instead, they opened up an exciting new direction - one that has the potential to reshape the future of the wellbeing profession.

Three key discoveries that changed our approach

1. The need for a professional framework
While it was no surprise that training and development are essential for wellbeing professionals, participants highlighted that something fundamental is missing: a clear, structured foundation to guide these efforts. They emphasised the need for a professional framework that could underpin training, providing consistency and direction for those in the field.

2. A growing profession with no clear pathway
As organisations increasingly prioritise employee wellbeing, the demand for dedicated wellbeing professionals is rising. However, both employers and professionals shared the challenges they face in navigating this landscape. Employers struggle to recruit, develop, and retain the right talent, while professionals often feel uncertain about the skills and training required to thrive in these roles. A lack of defined career pathways was a major barrier, leaving many without guidance on how to recruit, grow and progress.

3. The diversity of backgrounds of wellbeing professionals
It is not just that there is no clear pathway, but that there are multiple pathways to becoming a wellbeing professional through different professional backgrounds (such as HR, Health and Safety, Occupational Health, lived experience and others). Whilst it is clear that each one of these backgrounds bring a set of unique skills and experience, the lack of an overall approach means that there is a lack of understanding in terms of both strengths and gaps brought by diverse backgrounds.

Laying the right foundations before training

These insights made one thing clear: before we can expand our training and development offerings, we need to lay the right foundations. This means:

• Defining core competencies and essential skills for wellbeing professionals
• Establishing clear career pathways across different specialisms
• Outlining role parameters to support professional growth and employer expectations
• Enhancing visibility and recognition of wellbeing professionals in the workplace

We also realised that to do this, we need to create a forum whereby the multiple different professional backgrounds are able to collaborate and work together to create a shared understanding. By building this, we can help organisations recruit, develop, and retain talent, while also giving professionals a clearer roadmap for success. Moreover, these foundations will support our partnering institutions such as IOSH and SOM as well as other academic partners in developing evidence-based curricula to strengthen both their individual professional offerings, and the wellbeing profession as a whole.

Our next step: developing a professional framework for wellbeing professionals

Recognising the critical need for these foundations, the focus of our 2025 Research Consortium project is to develop a Professional Framework for Wellbeing Professionals. This framework will be built using an evidence-based approach, drawing on insights from a steering group of expert leaders and stakeholders in the field, existing evidence and literature, as well as roundtable discussions, interviews, and a survey gathering perspectives from wellbeing professionals.

We're incredibly excited to address this crucial gap and to support both employers and professionals by developing this framework.

Do you want to be part of this work? We'd love to hear from you!

🔗 Register your interest here