We Started With a Simple Belief: That People are Always the Point.

TalentSensus was founded by Rowena Timms and Stephen Rice, two labour force specialists who spent years working inside the system before deciding to change it.

Before TalentSensus, before Upskill Enterprise (our original name), there were Sector Skills Councils. For most of the 2000s and into the 2010s, Rowena and Stephen worked at the heart of the UK’s government-licensed skills infrastructure. These bodies were charged with understanding what industries actually needed from their workforces, and building the frameworks, qualifications and standards to deliver it. They worked across justice, local government, financial services, fire and rescue and the armed forces. They didn’t advise from a distance. They were inside the room mapping functions, designing curricula, consulting senior leaders and reforming structures.

This experience gave them something most consultancies can’t buy: they understood workforce development not as a product to be sold but as a system to be understood from the inside out.

Belfast, 2015. Two people. A big idea.

In August 2015, Rowena and Stephen founded Upskill Enterprise, a small, ambitious company based in Belfast’s Titanic Quarter. They had a single conviction: that the most valuable thing you can do for any organisation is help it see its own people more clearly.

Within months, they were working on a scale that belied their size. A €2 million EU Horizon 2020 project – Gaming for Peace – brought them into a pan-European consortium developing serious games to teach peacekeeping and conflict prevention. They managed the delivery of an International Federation of Red Cross community resilience programme, helping communities across Europe learn to withstand flooding. They designed methodologies to recognise and validate migrant skills. They advised the Northern Ireland Government on best practice in work-based learning. They partnered with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research on programmes for refugee communities in Africa.

None of this was accidental. Rowena and Stephen had always believed that workforce thinking, done properly, was not a corporate exercise. It was a human one. The same skills that helped a policing service reform itself could help a community rebuild after a disaster. The same frameworks that identified talent in a financial services firm could give a refugee a recognised pathway into work.

That conviction – that people and their potential are always the point – is the thread that runs from those early projects to everything TalentSensus does today.

From Upskill Enterprise to TalentSensus: scaling what works

Over the years that followed, the work grew. More sectors. More countries. Deeper partnerships. Programmes in the United States working with workforce boards across Missouri and beyond. National cyber skills infrastructure in Ireland. Community regeneration in Northern Ireland. Policing reform. Skills passports. Technology platforms were built not because technology was interesting, but because the right technology, thoughtfully designed and properly embedded, could help organisations see and develop their people in ways that weren’t possible before.

TalentSensus is the evolution of that journey. The name is different. The ambition is larger. But the belief at the centre hasn’t moved: the workforce is not a resource to be managed. It’s a capability to be understood, invested in and unleashed.

What drives us and where it comes from

Our values didn’t come from a workshop. They came from the work.

Pioneering

came from years of being asked to solve problems that didn’t have established answers from peacekeeping curricula to pre-eligibility systems for US workforce agencies. We learned to be comfortable at the frontier.

A group of young people smiling and having coffee at a round table.

Human-Centric

came from the Red Cross, from refugee programmes, from sitting with frontline staff and understanding that no system works unless the people inside it believe it was built for them.

Smiling mature manager pointing at sticky notes on a glass wall while brainstorming with his diverse team in a modern office

Collaborative

came from every project where the best outcome required us to bring our expertise and step back; to listen before we designed, to test before we delivered, to share authorship of the solution.

Proactive

came from working inside sector skills systems long enough to see change coming before it arrived, and from learning that the organisations who thrived were the ones who prepared rather than reacted.

Today

TalentSensus operates across the UK, Europe and the United States.

Our team brings together specialists in workforce strategy, technology implementation, learning and skills design, data and analytics, and complex programme management. We work with public agencies, private employers, workforce boards, national governments and community organisations.

Rowena and Stephen still lead the company – still in every project, still curious, still convinced that the best work happens when you treat every client’s people as the most important variable in the room.

If that sounds like the kind of partner you’ve been looking for, we’d love to talk.

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