HR articles

Chief Learning Officer (CLO): What the Role Is, What a CLO Does and How to Become One

2026-10-20 13:02
SHORT ANSWER

A Chief Learning Officer (CLO) is the senior leader responsible for how a company learns. The CLO links learning to the company strategy, decides which business problems learning can solve and which it cannot, runs training, career development and organizational development as one system, and shows management evidence of results. Most CLOs grow from L&D managers who learned to speak the language of the business.

Course on this topic: Learning and Development Course: L&D Manager Training

I have been in HR for 21 years, at Alfa-Bank, StarLightMedia, Wargaming, Preply, iDeals and PeopleForce, and today I run Pritula Academy.
Below: what a Chief Learning Officer actually owns, how the role differs from an L&D manager and an HR director, a learning strategy chain you can copy, how a CLO proves results, the skills behind the role, and a free CLO readiness check to see how far you are from the role today.

What is a Chief Learning Officer (CLO)?

A Chief Learning Officer is the senior leader responsible for how the company learns. Not for the training calendar, but for the question behind it: which capabilities does the business need to reach its strategy, and how will people get them?
The clearest map of this scope is the human resource development model of Swanson and Holton, which I use in my course. It has three parts:
  • Training and development builds personal competencies and personal effectiveness.
  • Career management connects what a person wants to grow into with the roles the company will need.
  • Organizational development builds company capabilities and company effectiveness.
All three are aligned with the company strategy and the staffing strategy. An L&D manager usually lives in the first part. A CLO is accountable for all three and for the alignment between them.

CLO vs L&D manager vs HR director: who does what?

Titles differ between companies, so look at the scope:
  • L&D manager runs learning programs: diagnoses the need, designs the program, delivers it, supports transfer to the job and evaluates the result.
  • Head of a corporate university runs a permanent learning structure: internal trainers, faculties, programs for managers, a learning budget.
  • Chief Learning Officer owns the whole learning portfolio and its link to the strategy: which programs exist at all, which are stopped, and how learning connects with recruiting, performance reviews, pay and succession.
  • HR director or CHRO is responsible for the whole HR function. In many companies learning is one of their areas, and there is no separate CLO.
FROM MY PRACTICE · STARLIGHTMEDIA AND WARGAMING

I can compare two large companies from my own experience: the STB TV channel and Wargaming. STB had 2,500 employees; the Wargaming office where I worked had 2,000, while the whole company had 4,000 people at the time. In both companies we trained employees, and the training budgets were decent, bigger at Wargaming, of course.

But Wargaming had a corporate university, and STB did not. At STB, learning was handled by me as the HR director and my training manager. We had no internal trainers, but we had a good contractor who helped with the very large learning events. At Wargaming there was a head of the corporate university, a little later a deputy appeared, there were internal trainers and even a librarian who bought books and kept track of them.

With a dedicated learning leader and a corporate university, the work becomes far more systematic and structured than when HR tries to carry learning on its own.

— Mike Pritula

What does a Chief Learning Officer do?

Here is the role as I teach it, in seven responsibilities:
  1. Links learning to the company strategy. Every program starts from a business priority, not from a list of topics people asked for.
  2. Decides what is a learning problem at all. Results depend on four things: the worker (knowledge, skills, motivation), the work (processes and procedures), the workplace (resources, tools, culture) and the world outside. Training fixes only the first one. If the real cause is a missing access or a conflicting instruction, the CLO sends it to the right owner instead of launching a course.
  3. Builds complete learning experiences. The 6D model in my course describes the cycle: define business outcomes, design the complete experience, deliver for application, drive transfer, deploy performance support, document results.
  4. Proves results. More on this below.
  5. Develops careers and talent. Career management, succession planning, high potentials, development conversations between managers and employees.
  6. Supports organizational development and change. Change management step by step (in the course I use Kotter's eight steps), a learning organization, and knowledge management.
  7. Connects learning with the other HR systems. Job analysis defines development needs; recruiting needs internal candidates ready for promotion and programs for new employees; performance evaluation shows performance gaps; compensation can reward performance; the HRIS stores skills and learning activities.

How does a CLO build a learning strategy? A chain you can copy

A learning strategy is not a catalogue. It is a set of decisions that connect the business to the work people do. Before you invest in any program, fill in one chain:
  1. Business priority — in words the process owner recognises.
  2. Work behavior — what the employee must do, with a verb someone could observe.
  3. Learning action — the practice that rehearses exactly that behavior.
  4. Evidence — the work record or observation that will show the behavior, with its status: planned, collected, not yet collected.
  5. Owner — who supplies the work rule, who prepares the practice, who gives feedback.
Fictional example from my course:

Priority: reliable request routing.
Work behavior: check the request code, destination and owner before handing a request over; escalate an uncertain destination.
Learning action: guided practice with an unfamiliar request.
Evidence: task observation, collection planned.
Not claimed: savings or retention, because no data was supplied.
Read the chain both ways: for any proposed activity, ask which task it rehearses; for any proposed evidence, ask which behavior it records.
To fill in the first line, a CLO has to know the business. These six questions from my course are a good start:
  1. What is the most important source of income?
  2. What is the most important driver of growth?
  3. What are the key elements of the strategy?
  4. Who is the main competitor?
  5. What is the biggest threat to the business?
  6. What is the largest human capital problem in the business?
Then look outside with a PESTLE scan: political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal factors. One rule I insist on: an external trend without a source is a hypothesis, not a fact. Write it down as unverified, name the person who will check it, and do not build a confident launch argument on it. Inside the company, start the needs analysis with a template such as How to Analyse Learning Needs.

How does a CLO measure the results of learning?

Management does not buy training; it buys a change in the work. So a CLO separates four kinds of evidence, the four levels of evaluation:
  • Reaction — perceived usefulness and effectiveness of the training and the trainer.
  • Learning — a post-test, a pre- and post-test, or a pre- and post-test with a control group.
  • Behavior — observation, simulations, 360-degree feedback, critical incidents at work.
  • Outcome — achievement of goals and performance results; at the top, cost-benefit or return on investment.
Two rules matter more than the model itself. First, do not substitute one level for another: a good satisfaction score does not prove behavior changed, and an observed behavior does not prove a business result. Second, keep the target and the result apart: a target in a plan is not an observed result. The evaluation procedure in my course has six steps: agree the sponsor's question, specify the observable result, select the source, schedule collection with an owner, collect and check, and report for a decision. For level 1, here is how to create a training evaluation form.
FROM MY PRACTICE · STB AND WARGAMING

At the STB TV channel we measured learning roughly like this, and Wargaming had a similar system. In large companies with centralised learning, evaluation is simply a must-have. We sent out instant questionnaires right away, people gave their opinion, and the next day after the training we already had a report ready.

Knowledge was tested during the annual testing; we did not test right after the training. Behavior was assessed during the annual assessment, and results were also evaluated during the annual results review. And one more important point: it is not only about the training itself but also about the learning design. You may blame the quality, but maybe the design itself was wrong.

Plug each level of evaluation into a process the company already runs. And before you blame the quality of a training, check its design.

— Mike Pritula

What skills does a Chief Learning Officer need?

The most complete map I know is the ATD Talent Development Capability Model of the Association for Talent Development. It has three areas:
  • Building personal capability — communication, emotional intelligence and decision making, collaboration and leadership, cultural awareness and inclusion, project management, compliance and ethical behavior, lifelong learning.
  • Developing professional capability — learning sciences, instructional design, training delivery and facilitation, technology application, knowledge management, career and leadership development, coaching, evaluating impact.
  • Impacting organizational capability — business insight, consulting and business partnering, organization development and culture, talent strategy and management, performance improvement, change management, data and analytics, future readiness.
An L&D manager is usually strong in the professional area. The organizational area is what makes talent development a mechanism that drives the effectiveness and results of the whole organization, and that is where the CLO role begins. Rate yourself below.
FREE TOOL

CLO readiness check

Rate yourself on the 23 capabilities of the ATD Talent Development Capability Model: 0 — I have not done this yet, 1 — I have done it with help or now and then, 2 — I do it on my own and can show a result. You get a score for each of the three areas, a reading of your profile and the three capabilities to develop first. The scale and thresholds are my simplification for this article, not part of the ATD model. The answers below are a fictional example; replace them with your own.

The full version, with the training diagnosis, design, transfer and evaluation tools for every step of a learning program, is in the Learning and Development Course: L&D Manager Training.

A 2 needs evidence: a program you ran, a report management used, a decision you influenced. Take your three priorities as a development plan for the next year.

How to become a Chief Learning Officer

There is no single entry path, but the steps that move an L&D professional toward the role are the same:
  1. Run one program through the full cycle. From the business diagnosis to a short report for the sponsor, on your own data.
  2. Switch to business language. This is the main advantage of the 6D approach: it moves the conversation from the language of HR to the language of the business. Talk about the work outcome, not about hours of training.
  3. Learn to say no to training. When the cause sits in the work, the workplace or the world, name it and send it to its owner.
  4. Take on careers and succession. Career management, development conversations, backups for critical roles. This is where learning starts to serve the staffing strategy.
  5. Join a change project. See what learning can and cannot do inside a real change, step by step.
  6. Write a learning strategy for your company, even if nobody asked: three business priorities, the chain for each, and the evidence you will bring.

Common mistakes of learning leaders

  • A course for every request. An annual topic list tells you what people asked to study, not which task needs to change.
  • Training as the answer to every problem. If people cannot do the task under normal conditions because of access, tools or rules, more content will not help.
  • Evaluation by satisfaction survey only. It answers the reaction question and nothing else.
  • Promises without data. Savings, retention and growth forecasts with no source damage trust faster than a modest, honest report.
  • No support after the session. Without transfer to the job and support at the moment of need, the training ends at the classroom door.
One question for this week: if your CEO asked which business priority each of your current programs serves, could you answer for every one of them?
I teach the whole cycle, from learning basics and the competency model of an L&D expert through diagnosis, design, result-based learning, transfer, support, evaluation, employee development and organizational development to the learning strategy of the company, in the Learning and Development Course: L&D Manager Training. If you are building online and AI-supported learning, see also AI in Employee Training: Course for L&D and HR.
FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What does a Chief Learning Officer do?

A CLO links learning to the company strategy, decides which problems learning can solve, runs training, career development and organizational development as one system, and reports evidence of results to management.

What is the difference between a CLO and an L&D manager?

An L&D manager runs learning programs from diagnosis to evaluation. A CLO owns the whole learning portfolio: which programs exist at all, how they serve the strategy, and how learning connects with recruiting, performance reviews, pay and succession.

Does every company need a Chief Learning Officer?

No. In a smaller company the HR director and a training manager often carry learning together. A separate learning leader or a corporate university makes sense when learning becomes a large, permanent system with its own team and budget.

What skills does a CLO need?

All three areas of the ATD Talent Development Capability Model: personal capabilities such as communication and decision making, professional ones such as instructional design and evaluating impact, and organizational ones such as business insight, change management, data and talent strategy.

How do you become a Chief Learning Officer?

Run at least one program through the full cycle, from business diagnosis to a management report, learn to explain learning in business terms, and take on career development, succession and change projects, not only training.