Secrets of success: Janis Ireland, Pensions governance and operations manager at Heineken

How has your pensions career developed?

I have been in the pensions industry for 30 years. – although I didn’t set out to look for a career in pensions. I applied for a job at Standard Life and was put into a pensions role in the consultancy part of the business. I then moved to an in-house position with Guinness, which became Diageo, then Scottish and Newcastle. Myself and my team were outsourced to Mercer where I stayed for four years, before returning to an in-house position at Heineken.

Personally, I prefer an internal role because I feel there is more freedom, more variety with no two days being the same, and no focus on having to get clients.

Heineken has received a lot of positive recognition for its pensions scheme. What has driven that success?

One of our main priorities has been communication. A lot of the information people receive about pensions is full of jargon, so we worked with our internal communications team to make sure we improved our approach.

Some of the methods I’ve used include annual renewal pensions roadshows, and also quarterly one-to-ones off site. I have just completed one of those with almost 150 people and it is really making a difference. It raises the profile of the pension scheme, because one person who comes along to find out something they need will then tell somebody else about it.

One to one sessions also help us to get feedback and find out what types of questions are coming up frequently. We can then use those to plan future communications.

We’ve also undertaken an annual communications survey and one of the key messages was employees wanted more face to face help. There’s still a long way to go to help with understanding. Many people just don’t know what they are going to get for their retirement, people still aren’t planning properly for retirement.

If you were talking to someone at an earlier stage in their career, what advice would you give them?

I’d recommend that they get a mix of in-house and consultancy experience. That gives you a better understanding of the market, and you can understand lots of different points of view. If you only work in-house, there’s a risk that you can get isolated – it’s good to be able to understand things from a consultant perspective.