At the start of every Thinqi journey, we like to capture a vision of what success in learning looks like for our customers, including their goals, visions and plans for their L&D journey with Thinqi.
We were delighted to catch up with our friends in Social Care and Health at Monmouthshire County Council who are currently piloting the Thinqi learning system on behalf of the organisation.
Learning opportunities for the whole organisation
“The vision is definitely to have one learning system that sits across the whole corporate organisation so that we don’t just sit within a silo for social care,” says Naomi Lovesay, Workforce Development Manager in Social Care and Health at Monmouthshire County Council. “We want to be able to look at the learning and development opportunities right across the whole organisation, and for individual learners to track and take ownership of their own learning.”
They want managers to see the benefits too. Thinqi’s smarter learning system will enable them to monitor compliance within their teams and hold pertinent conversations about how they can support individual learning journeys within the team.
“It’s all about better outcomes for the community”
Before implementing Thinqi, Naomi says they had no way to manage compliance other than trawling through time-consuming paper-based records, which proved impractical for any busy L&D professional.
“We had to do a lot of time-consuming activities,” says Naomi. “It wasn’t efficient and we didn’t have it all in one place.”
Tracking learning data is key for refining the L&D strategy. However, up until now, any information around data analytics was just done manually and in a disjointed manner, which proved a real point of frustration. Naomi wants to see this change with the help of Thinqi: “We need to be able to look at what learning people need and plan the amount of L&D opportunities that people require. At the moment it’s a little bit finger in the wind around how many courses we need – for example, manual handling – whereas now we’ll have the exact numbers to offer the right amount of training.”
They’ll also be able to easily track compliance for the benefit of the community. “This is going to be hugely supportive for us as a team not only to plan the right training, but also for managers to ensure staff are compliant and our communities are safe. It’s all about better outcomes for the community in addition to our workforce,” says Naomi.
Piloting for success
A pilot is an initial small-scale implementation that is used to prove the viability of a larger rollout. It enables our customers to manage the risks, identify any deficiencies and address any concerns before scaling up to wider implementation, by first testing it with a small cohort of people within a specific timeframe.
It’s why we help our customers every step of the way to make their initial pilot a success ready for the wider Thinqi rollout.
So, how easy was it for the Social Care and Health team to get started with Thinqi and run their initial pilot?
“Personally, I think it’s been a really easy and smooth process so far,” confirms Naomi. “Thinqi is very intuitive and that’s certainly some of the feedback we’ve received about it too. Every time we have a meeting I find out more and more about what it can do and I get more and more ideas – I think our biggest limitation is the time and capacity to be able to use it fully ready for migration, so it is all about small steps. Some of what we did in light of our initial pilot now opens up a lot more opportunities around what we can do and how we can use Thinqi moving forward. As it’s all coming together, things are a lot more joined up now and we’re able to see things in context.”
Working together to achieve success
We’ve loved working with the Social Care and Health team at Monmouthshire County Council so far, so we were pleased to hear that they’ve felt just as positively about working together.
“The Thinqi team have been very helpful – really good. Everyone’s been very open to what we’ve been doing and listened to our ideas and challenges. They’ve worked with us to understand those challenges and helped us look at how we can resolve them, and how we can use that as an opportunity to create the best learning and development for our staff in Monmouthshire.”
It’s been as positive a start as we’d hoped and we can’t wait to see that success becoming a reality across the wider organisation.