APM Wins bronze at Brandon Hall: Completions up 7x

How a core team of four, backed by specialists across the business, reignited project managers’ excitement about their learning platform  

“I always love getting the kind of feedback when people say, ‘This helped me feel more confident at work,’ or, ‘I'm going to try something new.’” — Sarah Layzell, APM 

The Association for Project Management (APM) is the only chartered membership body for project professionals in the world, with members working everywhere from tech startups to defense contractors. After its member learning platform hit end-of-life, the association rebuilt it in twelve weeks, redesigning content around real project scenarios instead of static reference material. The payoff is big. Members are now finishing seven times more courses than before, in a non-policed continuous learning program. That result just earned APM Learning a Bronze award for Best Association Professional Development Program at the 2026 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards.  

In the year after the rebuild, as members rediscovered the value of the learning platform, logins climbed 33% and completion metrics jumped. Here's how a small team pulled it off, and what it means for any L&D team competing for optional attention. 

Why 35 hours of quality professional development training had to be earned 

APM recommends 35 hours of continuing professional development a year. It's tracked, but not policed, so the platform has to earn every visit on its own merits. 

“APM offers qualifications, training, resources, and mentoring for project professionals,” Layzell says. “We also offer the only chartered standard in the world for project professionals.” That standard is what the 35 hours are meant to protect. 

For a while, the platform meant to support this continuous development got in the way instead. “We had all these beautifully designed modules sitting in a platform that people found really difficult to use and engage with,” Layzell says. The content held up, but the platform didn't. 

The material itself, mapped to APM's own Body of Knowledge and Competence Framework, the same framework behind its qualifications and chartership, held serious value, but members just couldn't reach it. “It was a bit of a hidden treasure trove,” they noted. “We knew it was good, but people couldn't get to it.” 

The fix started with a platform decision. APM moved its learning content onto Absorb LMS and rebuilt the member experience around it. 

Building for “what would you do,” not what to remember 

Every one of APM Learning's 65-plus modules starts with a concept from the Body of Knowledge or Competence Framework, broken down into what it means, why it matters, and what it looks like on a project. From there, the team builds scenarios. Some show a skill “being demonstrated really well,” Layzell says; others show “things going a little bit wrong,” so members have to stop and work out what they'd have done differently. 

That sort of considered material is a very deliberate bet that a scenario a project manager recognizes from their own experience would teach more than a slide deck ever could. Once a module exists, the team wires deep links into newsletters, event pages, and campaign emails, so a member who clicks a mention of, say, stakeholder management lands on that exact module instead of a search page they have to work through first. 

The rebuild ran on a 12-week timeline. A core team of four coordinated the work day to day: a marketing lead, an integrations and website specialist, a change coordinator, and Layzell herself, who owned data migration and worked with the design team on branding. That core team wasn't working alone. A steering group kept the project visible at leadership level, Absorb's implementation team supplied technical specialists, and APM's data protection officer and brand manager weighed in on their own pieces. Four people don't get much runway to redesign a benefit an entire membership depends on, which is likely why the team leaned so hard on scenario-based modules it had already built rather than starting from scratch, and why, over the past year and a half, it has moved more of that content-building in-house, using its own authoring tools instead of relying on outside vendors, a shift Layzell calls “very fun” and one that's let APM double its content output without adding budget. It's a lean way to pull off a project this size, and it worked. 

Winning back the benefit of the doubt 

The technical fix was the easier part. The harder problem was psychological in that members who'd been frustrated by the old platform weren't going to automatically trust the new one just because someone told them it worked. 

“If you get bounced out of a website and have to reset your password, unless it's a service you really need, you're probably going to put your phone down and forget about it.” — Sarah Layzell, APM 

APM couldn't force a second look, so it made the first one as easy as possible. The rollout went in phases. First, there was a soft launch to existing users, with old completion records carried over so nobody lost credit for work they'd already done. Then came advance communications, and then the public conference launch. Along the way, a dedicated email inbox routed every question straight to Layzell, so small problems got resolved before they became reasons to give up. 

The team also had to win over its own colleagues. Layzell needed APM's marketing team to promote the new tool, so they built a five-minute course, hosted inside Absorb, that taught APM staff how to use it. “It gave people instant proof that everything was working.” Their colleagues saw the fix work firsthand before anyone asked them to vouch for it publicly. 

Once the internal team was on board, APM took the same test public. At its annual conference, Layzell walked a room of project professionals through the new platform live, with no recording and no do-over. 

That combination, internal proof first, public proof second, is what rebuilt confidence in the platform and excitement for the content. 

What the numbers can, and can't, tell you 

Logins were up 33% year over year, course completions up sevenfold, and support queries about access and login problems down from three or more a day to one or two a week, a drop of roughly 90%. Those moved because APM changed what members were interacting with, and the line from cause to effect is short. 

One member's course evaluation captures something the numbers can't: “On APM Platform I have bite size courses that help me revise my knowledge. I can also cook dinner for my family while I am doing it.” Later in the same evaluation: “All I need is to find time to turn it on, and I find myself focusing on best practices, thinking about how I can improve, how to get my team back on track to be successful.”  

Layzell also uses the platform's own search analytics to solve other issues, like members searching for content that already exists but that's tagged or titled in ways they don't recognize. It's a smaller fix than redesigning a module, and provides really valuable information. 

The lesson for every L&D team chasing optional engagement 

None of this needed new content, a massive budget, or a mandate from the top. It's what happens when a small team removes friction and treats professional development like a benefit members reach for, rather than a system they've been told to log into. That's a more useful takeaway for another association's L&D lead than “modernize your LMS,” because it names the constraint that so many organizations feel. That's earning attention from people who don't have to give it, one working login at a time. 

That work earned APM Learning a Bronze award for Best Association Professional Development Program at the 2026 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards. Layzell puts the credit to their team. “It's just a reflection of the team's hard work, and everyone across the business who helped us build the start of something.” 

What's next for APM Learning 

Now that they’ve got the adoption, the team's is going to take on is relevance through personalization. APM's membership spans people running multi-million dollar projects and people two years into their first job, across industries with nothing in common beyond the word “project.” “There's a lot of interest right now in making the experience more personalized by career stage,” Layzell says. They want to continue to expand search and hone their evaluation data to find where the current library could be expanded.

None of it, they say, has to happen all at once. 

“It doesn't have to be the finished product on day one. It just has to work. If there's something for people to explore, you can build on that.” — Sarah Layzell, APM 

That's exactly what happened at APM, one login, one module, one demo at a time. The team at Absorb LMS congratulates Sarah and the whole APM team! 

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