We caught up with the great people at Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW), to see how they’re implementing smarter learning technologies to develop their award-winning talent management strategy.
Developing leadership talent within the team
Through the lens of compassionate leadership, HEIW’s other objective is around creating leadership resources and programmes that enable them to develop executive and senior leaders across NHS Wales.
“We need identify and map existing executive roles including developing an inclusive process for recruiting talent, developing talent and deploying talent in line with our national NHS Wales Succession strategy 2017-27” says Helen Thomas, Assistant Director of Leadership and Succession at HEIW.
To help them succeed, HEIW turned to Thinqi.
Thinqi is their enabler for creating talent pools and pipelines of talent, drilling down into the data and creating dashboards to assess readiness and identify aspiring talent.
It’s enabled them, for the first time in NHS Wales, to have some sort of maturity around the talent management process.
A multi award-winning strategy
What successes have HEIW achieved to date in terms of talent management with Thinqi?
While they were initially looking for a simple repository for leadership resources, the team have now got a product that’s integral to their entire leadership and succession programme.
“It’s become an essential tool to help us engage and develop our staff and embed a compassionate and collective leadership culture, supported by evidence-based and accessible resource, toolkits, webinars, masterclasses and other resources,. It’s helping us to embed our leadership strategy and that’s one of the successes in itself,” says Emily Millar, Programme Manager at HEIW.
In 2021 and 2022, HEIW scooped Gold at the prestigious Learning Technologies Awards and were finalists with Thinqi in the Learning Awards 2022.
Other Thinqi features HEIW are implementing to achieve success include:
Events and conferencing functionality
Thinqi has enabled HEIW to use the conferencing functionality and host events far more regularly than ever before. These sessions can then be recorded and made readily available, then added to learning pathways or built into their talent processes. More and more universities and partners of HEIW are taking advantage of this public-facing element to use this for themselves.
Success profiles
Success profiles have enabled people to discover the career pathways available to them and identify the skills they’ll need to acquire along the way. Along with a registration process to capture equality data, this will enable HEIW to focus on their equality and diversity agendas to ensure that any leaders are representative of the communities and populations NHS Wales serves.
360 evaluations tool
The 360 evaluations tool in Thinqi enhances this self-led experience and ensures everyone is able to assess themselves against success profiles and ask others to assess them too.
Badges
Thinqi’s Badges feature creates a reporting mechanism that HEIW can use to identify their ‘ready-now’ talent and the talent that will be ready soon with time and further support.
“Thinqi is personalised to our direct needs”
What makes Thinqi different from other learning systems for HEIW?
“My experience of existing systems and Thinqi are significantly different ” says Helen. “It’s the aesthetics, the ease of use and navigation, the functionality that entices you in along with the bilingual nature that you don’t easily get with other learning systems. The design and branding that we’re able to maximise makes it all the more personalised.”
Emily agrees: “When we showcase Thinqi, we often get approached for further information on the system leading to numerous meetings with various stakeholders from Wales and outside of Wales. At the moment, we’ve got colleagues from across all the UK nations using Thinqi to participate in leadership programmes and events and their experience has been extremely positive and complimentary .”
When it comes to getting the best out of smarter learning, HEIW’s got talent.
