“I originally came up with the name, Chief Education Officer (CEO), but Jack said there was only room for one CEO…,” quips Steve Kerr, the first-ever Chief Learning Officer (CLO) of the world hired by the legendary CEO of General Electric (GE), Jack Welch. Welch understood the importance of education in business back in the late 1980s and hired Kerr to run GE’s 59-acre management training center.

A good idea catches on and it did.

Take, Amy Hayes of Facebook, the Global head of learning and development, who trains over 9,500 employees; or PwC’s CLO, Tom Evans, in-charge of over 39,000 employees; businesses today are repositioning their learning and development function as a strategic business enabler.
Who are CLOs and why are organizations appointing them? Here is a roundabout.

Who is a Chief Learning Officer (CLO)?

Chief Learning Officers (CLOs) are not just teachers or trainers. These are people with years of corporate experience and business acumen to deliver business outcomes linked directly to their learning services.

A CLO is a senior C-level executive who comes with over 10 years of corporate experience, brought to oversee the learning and development activities in the company. They typically report to CEOs. They may be christened as CLO, Chief Talent Officer (CTO), Chief Knowledge Officer or Chief Learning and Development Officer.

CLOs know the art of hooking learning with organizational efficiency. They do so by ensuring that two conditions are met, as emphasized by Chris Argyris, one of the world’s renowned organizational thinkers,

• There is a match between their learning outcomes and what the organization intends to achieve;

• And most importantly, the causes of mismatch (if any) between organizational intention and learning outcomes are identified and corrected.

CLO: Why your business needs one?

“The C-suite is finally catching up to what they have always intuitively understood but never addressed. That learning and performance are two sides of the same coin,” says David Mallon, the vice president and chief analyst at Deloitte Consulting.

CLOs fill numerous gaps — be it training of new hires, developing leadership skills or teaching employees to streamline their day to day decision making, CLOs are proving to be a critical cog in performance optimization of organizations.

Enhanced Productivity without breaking the bank

A Chief Learning Officer knows that learning is not enough and performance evaluation is as important. Their fancy ‘Chief’ titles are not just in name but spirit too. They catalyse change without denting the vaults beyond what’s necessary. Creating standards of performance expectations and performance monitoring metrics for organizations is one of the crucial tasks of CLOs.

While doing so, they keep in touch with changing trends and expectations. For instance, reprioritizing work culture to adapt to the future of work wherein humans would focus on things that matter and menial tasks would be handled by the machines.

Engagement and Retention

CLOs are close relatives of retention. The studies suggest that most millennials consider Learning and Development as vital for organizational culture. This is why it is important for companies to develop their key employees and improve retention by engaging them in self-development. Learning and Development at the workplace have a direct correlation with employee satisfaction.

Succession planning

Most companies hire Chief Learning Officers for training and development of their senior executives. When companies expand or when new blood is injected in the organization, it becomes vital for existing workforce to assume leadership roles. CLOs are capacity-building professionals. They ensure a smooth succession of managerial roles and seamless integration of people with their level of craft and responsibilities.