Customer success story: Neath Port Talbot

Neath Port Talbot Council serves one of Wales' most diverse communities, employing 6,500 staff across education, social care, highways, planning and numerous other essential services. For over a decade, austerity had forced difficult choices, and workforce development had taken a back seat. Sheenagh Rees, Head of People and Organisational Development, describes the turning point: "We were coming out of a decade of austerity, we'd been through the pandemic, and we were recognising that what we hadn't done over those 12+ years was really invest in our workforce. Our priorities had been more about reducing headcount and had really not been about developing or building up our workforce."

With hard-to-fill posts becoming increasingly difficult to recruit and salary budgets unable to compete with the private sector, the council needed to position itself as an employer of choice. That meant demonstrating genuine commitment to employee development and creating visible career pathways. But the learning management system they had was holding them back.

The challenge: Fragmented systems and invisible career pathways

The council's existing learning platform was neither accessible nor fit for purpose. Employees struggled to track mandatory training, understand what development was available, or see career progression routes. For external social care providers commissioned by the council, the problems were even worse. Jamie, a manager at one care provider, explains: "With the previous medication platform that they had through COVID, it was kind of disjointed...Care workers found it a hard platform to use, and then they'd have to try and link it up with the local authority; they'd have to print off their work or type it up on a Word document and send it in."

The result was frustration across the board. Manual processes, disconnected systems and spreadsheet chaos made compliance difficult to track and quality impossible to assure. "I can't tell you the amount of spreadsheets in this folder, that folder, and the live spreadsheet as at this date," Jamie recalls. "Training may have taken place — has it been updated in the matrix?"

For a council trying to show employees that progression from cleaner to chief executive was genuinely possible, the technology gap sent entirely the wrong message. "Those frustrations of simple things being that slightly bit harder than they need to be make you look like an employer who isn't really interested in their employees," Sheenagh reflects.

Implementing Thinqi: Accessibility and strategic insight

When Neath Port Talbot selected Thinqi, the decision was driven by strategic workforce planning needs. The council needed a platform accessible enough for 6,500 geographically distributed staff, capable of supporting career pathway visibility and talent management, and able to serve external care providers seamlessly.

The impact on accessibility was immediate. "Thinqi is a very accessible system," Sheenagh explains. "So in itself it sounds quite basic, but that hasn't been our experience before. Employees being able to very easily access the system, very easily understand what their mandatory training is, and the training that we've assigned to their particular career pathway... those things sound quite simple, but through Thinqi it's very easily done."

For care providers, the transformation from disjointed processes to seamless training was equally striking. "Now it's all on the LMS," Jamie notes. "They can go through, they can answer the questions, they can match up their answers, and they get an instant result there, whereas before it was waiting until someone else marked the paperwork."

The platform replaced spreadsheet chaos with live data. "When the inspectorate or the local authority would come in previously, you'd have like a training matrix spreadsheet, and it would be only as good as the people that entered the data," Jamie explains. "Whereas now through Thinqi it's all live data."

The impact: From cost reduction to strategic workforce development

Thinqi has fundamentally changed how Neath Port Talbot approaches workforce development. The council's learning and development manager reports receiving "endless compliments" about how straightforward the system is to use. Employee engagement has improved as simple things have finally become simple. "That has been a big positive for us," Sheenagh notes.

For social care providers, the shift has streamlined recruitment, ensured consistent training quality and enabled confident reporting to regulators. The council can now monitor quality across commissioned services with real-time visibility rather than relying on outdated spreadsheets.

Most strategically, the platform is beginning to enable the workforce planning that had previously been impossible. "Pulling the metrics out of Thinqi, which is something we haven't been able to do before from a learning management system... and linking them to all those really key strategic programmes – that is our next big thing," Sheenagh explains. The council can now track completion rates, identify skills gaps and inform talent management decisions with evidence rather than assumption.

The ambition to position Neath Port Talbot as an employer where career progression from cleaner to chief executive is genuinely possible now has the infrastructure to support it. After more than a decade where development took a back seat to cost reduction, the council is finally investing in its people — and both employees and external partners can see the difference.

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