From new joiner to pensions specialist
How we built a 35+ course Learning Academy for Aptia — and won Brandon Hall Gold doing it.
At a glance
Client
Aptia — a global benefits and pensions administration company
domain
Pensions Administration (UK)
scope
35+ technical competency eLearning courses
Audience
New joiners with no prior pensions background
format
Interactive SCORM courses, deployed on the client’s LMS
Recognition
Gold, Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards 2025
The Challenge
UK pensions administration is a deep, unforgiving domain. Schemes, regulations, calculations, casework — it takes years to master, and every error touches someone’s retirement. Aptia needed new joiners, many with no pensions background at all, to become genuine specialists capable of handling complex casework while delivering exemplary customer service.
Traditional classroom training couldn’t scale with hiring, and shadowing experienced colleagues meant months of inconsistent, unrepeatable learning. Aptia needed a pathway — structured, self-paced, and rigorous — from day one to specialist.
What we Built
A Learning Academy of 35+ technical competency courses that walks a complete newcomer, course by course, into expertise. Each course tackles one competency, builds on the last, and tests understanding before the learner moves on — so progress is earned, not assumed.
Every course was written by our instructional designers working closely with Aptia’s subject matter experts, then built in Articulate Storyline as fully interactive SCORM packages for Aptia’s LMS.
Pensions Academy
One project • 35+ practitioner modules • a complete UK pensions curriculum
How We Made a Dry Subject Stick
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Real casework, not theory Pensions rules only make sense in practice. We built courses around realistic member cases — the situations administrators actually face — so learners practise the job, not just read about it.
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Learning by doing Learners click, sort, calculate, and decide at every turn. The more they interact, the more they remember.
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Plain Language Complex regulation was rewritten in simple, jargon-free language — clear enough for a newcomer, precise enough for a specialist.
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Relatable characters Characters and scenarios mirror the real workplace, so the learning feels like the job it prepares people for.
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Questions throughout Frequent, focused knowledge checks confirm understanding before the learner moves on — essential in a domain where errors are costly.
The Outcome
Aptia now has a repeatable, self-serve pathway that turns new joiners into pensions specialists — consistently, at scale, without pulling senior staff away from casework. Every new hire follows the same rigorous route to competence, and every course is there to revisit whenever a refresher is needed.
In 2025, the Academy won Gold at the Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards — one of the most recognized honours in corporate learning.
A Word on Partnership
This project is part of a wider partnership with Aptia. Over six months, we also helped set up their global Learning & Development ecosystem across the UK, the US, India, and Portugal — from their compliance LMS to their learning experience platform. The Academy is what a long-term partnership makes possible: we knew their world before we wrote a word.
Want to see inside the Academy?
The full courses are confidential — but we’d love to walk you through a live demo.
Schedule a demo: contact@zigmalearning.in.