AI is rapidly stripping away the “easy” work—the scheduling, reporting, data entry, and routine analysis that once filled the gaps in people’s days. At first glance, this looks like progress: the promise is that employees are freed from drudgery, allowing them to focus and have more time for high-value, strategic contributions.

But here’s the paradox CEOs and CHROs must confront: if all that’s left is cognitively demanding work, you risk creating an exhausted, perhaps more unproductive, workforce.

Why Easy Work Matters in Job Design

From an organizational psychology perspective, so-called “easy” tasks play critical roles in sustaining performance:

• Recovery cycles: Low-stakes tasks act as natural buffers, allowing employees to reset between periods of intense focus.

• Momentum and confidence: Quick wins on smaller items build morale and create a sense of progress.

• Skill development: Employees gain experience working on less complex tasks before moving into higher-stakes responsibilities.

Remove these elements, and you design jobs where employees live in a constant state of high cognitive load. In a world of work that is already stressful, this is not sustainable at scale.

The Strategic Risk of a “Hard-Work-Only” Organization

Without deliberate work design, AI-driven organizations may encounter:

• Higher burnout rates: Employees never get mental recovery time, leading to attrition.

• Erosion of learning pipelines: Entry-level workers lose safe places to practice and grow into future leaders.

• Decline in creativity: Overloaded teams default to short-term survival thinking instead of innovation.

• Toxic productivity norms: A culture where “always-on strategic performance” becomes the unspoken expectation.

Ironically, the very tools meant to elevate human work could destabilize the workforce if leaders don’t intervene.

“Stop Designing Jobs for Robots, Start Redesigning Them for Humans.”

Learn about our Work Design Peer Group

How CEOs and CHROs Can Mitigate the Dilemma

The solution isn’t to cling to old ways of working—it’s to intentionally reintroduce balance into job design. Here are key levers:

1. Redefine Work Portfolios
   Create roles with a deliberate mix of high-intensity and recovery tasks. If AI automates the basics, identify new “lightweight” responsibilities that still add value—such as mentoring, peer reviews, or low-stakes innovation sprints.

2. Build Cognitive Load Management into Work Design and Strategy
   Just as supply chains are managed for resilience, jobs must be designed for mental sustainability. Consider pacing models: deep work followed by decompression tasks, rather than back-to-back strategic problem-solving.

3. Protect Developmental Rungs
   The pipeline problem is real: if entry-level employees don’t have simpler tasks to start with, they’ll lack the practice grounds to advance. CHROs must rethink career ladders and create structured learning projects as substitutes.

4. Shift Performance Metrics
   Move away from measuring hours filled with “strategic work” and toward outcome-based metrics. High-value work cannot, and should not, be performed at maximum capacity all the time.

5. Normalize Recovery as a Leadership Responsibility
   Leaders must model the rhythm of intensity and recovery, so teams don’t interpret “AI has freed your time” as “you should now work harder, nonstop.”

6. Support Resiliency Training: Providing employees with tools and practices to help them stay refreshed and recharged as they integrate new ways of working will go a long way towards enabling them to thrive.

Building A Learning Culture That Lasts July 28, 2026 (1)

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This article summarizes the lead author’s three-part LinkedIn series and brings together three questions we’ve explored through CLO LIFT: WHY learning culture has never mattered more, WHAT enables it to thrive, and HOW to build and sustain one.

1. Post | LinkedIn: WHY learning culture has never mattered more.

2. Post | LinkedIn: WHAT creates the conditions for a learning culture to thrive?

3. Post | LinkedIn: HOW: Getting concrete – building a thriving learning culture

The biggest competitive advantage in the AI era is not technology; it’s learning faster than everyone else.

When the FIFA World Cup is in full swing, it’s a timely reminder that the best teams don’t prepare for a four-week tournament every four years. They build habits of learning, adapting and improving every day. In the age of AI, where the game is changing faster than ever, businesses aren’t so different. For us, a learning culture is simply an environment where people and organisations learn new skills faster than the world around them changes. It’s no longer a nice-to-have. It’s becoming one of the biggest competitive advantages an organization can have.

Part 1: Why learning culture has never mattered more

As we’ve reflected on this, one thing keeps coming up: learning becomes much easier when it’s connected to purpose.

As one of us (Chris Dunford) puts it: “I feel most energized and driven, and I perform at my best, when I am learning. Every role, project, event, and business trip is an opportunity to be curious and to develop and grow. It’s as simple as that - a philosophy I try to pass on to my two sons, who are rapidly approaching adulthood.”

Learning isn’t an obligation. It’s fuel. When people connect learning to what matters most to them, curiosity becomes natural, and growth becomes part of everyday life. This isn’t a new idea, but it is more important than ever when building a learning culture.

AI, market shifts and geopolitical uncertainty mean standing still isn’t an option. The organisations that succeed will be the ones that learn and adapt the fastest. Success comes from collective learning rather than individual brilliance. Thousands of small improvements, shared across teams, compound into lasting advantage. Here’s one example of how Bayer drove innovation at scale through learning.

Implementing a learning culture isn’t about more training courses or higher completion rates. It’s about creating an environment where curiosity is encouraged, experimentation is safe and learning happens in the flow of work. We think of it as “learning at match speed”: building learning agility, trying new ideas quickly and treating setbacks as opportunities to improve, using data and AI to continually refine performance to learn, adapt and evolve.

Part 2: What creates the conditions for a learning culture to thrive?

If the “why” is clear, the next question is much more practical: what actually enables a learning culture to thrive? Five conditions stand out.

1. Focus on ‘learning in the flow of work’

Learning culture isn’t owned by Learning & Development. L&D enables it, but leaders create it and everyone sustains it. The strongest cultures are those where leaders visibly model curiosity, teams share learning openly and learning becomes simply “how we work around here.” There needs to be a clear and visible connection between learning and better business outcomes. When people can see how learning improves customer value, performance and growth, learning stops feeling like extra work and starts feeling like part of the job.

Netflix, for example, has built a high-performance learning culture anchored in “freedom and responsibility - highly aligned, loosely controlled,” where there are minimal rules but a focus instead on continuous feedback, transparency, and maximum ownership and accountability to push employees to constantly grow and adapt.

2. Create psychological safety

Technology is playing an increasingly powerful role in personalizing and scaling learning, but it’s the human elements — psychological safety, shared ownership, and storytelling — that really bring it to life. None of this happens without psychological safety. People rarely experiment if mistakes are punished, and they rarely share what they’ve learned if vulnerability is seen as a weakness.

High-performing teams don’t just generate learning; they share learning at pace. One lesson from a customer, one experiment or one setback becomes shared knowledge that improves the whole organization. As the World Cup progresses into the knock-out stages, the teams that make it to the latter stages will be the ones who learn, adapt, and innovate quickly to achieve the best possible outcome.

3. Make continuous learning and experimentation the norm

At the same time, familiar barriers persist. Learning is often still seen as a ‘nice to have,’ something that happens “after hours,” and leadership commitment is patchy at best. There’s also often a lack of clarity around which skills really matter for the future, which makes it harder for people to prioritize their development. What’s encouraging, though, is how organisations are starting to tackle these challenges head-on.

Amazon’s relentless focus on ‘Day 1’ thinking encourages employees to ‘Learn and be curious: leaders are never done learning,’ where continuous learning is an ongoing expectation, not a development programme. Experimentation, customer obsession, and fast feedback loops make learning a daily operating discipline, not a one-off, periodic activity.

4. Measure what matters

Then there’s the question we kept coming back to: how do you know if efforts to embed a learning culture are actually working? Traditional metrics like learning hours and programme completions only tell a fraction of the story. The organisations making the most progress are looking much more broadly — at how learning is driving skill acquisition, behaviour change, client impact and business outcomes, and whether people feel encouraged to experiment, reflect and share.

Microsoft’s move from ‘know-it-all’ to ‘learn-it-all’ shows that learning is not about activity alone, but about collaboration, experimentation and continuous improvement. A real learning culture isn’t defined by what’s offered -it’s defined by individual and collective behaviour.

5. Build the right behaviors

The strongest learning cultures deliberately create moments to pause, reflect and ask, “What did we learn, and what will we do differently next time?” Without reflection, experience doesn’t automatically become learning.

A thriving learning culture isn’t defined by the learning platform you buy or the number of courses people complete. It’s defined by the behaviours people demonstrate every day: asking better questions, sharing what they’ve learned, experimenting safely, reflecting honestly, and helping others improve. Those small behaviours compound over time into something much bigger than any learning programme can deliver.

Next up - How to build one: a practical framework

So how do leaders intentionally create those behaviours? A learning culture is not a straightforward build. It is a complex behavioural system that supports continuous skill adaptation at scale. It reinforces learning daily, not episodically. And it requires an ecosystem of enablers:

• Leaders who are willing to visibly seek, apply and share new knowledge. Curiosity and reflection are normalised.

• Employees who are intrinsically motivated and/or incentivised to grow and experiment. Learning is tied to aspiration and identity, not compliance.

• Structure which embraces cross-team collaboration and talent mobility for diverse perspectives. People feel safe to challenge ideas and knowledge flows across boundaries.

• Enabling systems and processes that provide personalised learning resources, workflow integration (delivered in small, contextual ways) and incentives for growth.

It is clearly worth the effort. In Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends Report, researchers found that organizations that successfully increase the capacity of workers to grow personally, use their imagination, and think deeply are 1.8 times more likely to report better financial results.

Part 3: Getting concrete – building a thriving learning culture

The Learning Culture Playbook: five moves

1. Paint the picture. Begin by defining what good looks like — what does learning behaviour look like in your organisation? Do you expect people to:

• Set regular (micro) development goals

• Conduct frequent tiny experiments

• Teach and mentor others

• Share feedback with colleagues

• Seek new experiences regularly

2. Rewire the work. Next, consider how you would redesign daily workflows to support those behaviours on the job. The key is that development becomes part of work, not adjacent to it. For instance:

• Create and embed a project debrief methodology (after each milestone, determine what worked, what didn’t, what we can learn, what we will adjust)

• Set expectations that shadowing is encouraged — invite leaders “+1” to key meetings

• Cement the white space for reflection (e.g. calendar blocks, meeting invites with reflection time embedded)

• Expect development goal setting frequently vs. annually — track micro learning goals

3. Spark the why. Third, activate personal purpose and motivation. Help employees connect learning to their growth, their rewards, or their passion for their work. Show them how enhanced skills can lead to improved performance and career mobility. Ideas to try:

• A “Got Learning?” campaign — show examples of key leaders and how their careers relied on learning

• Establish a reward pool for experimentation

• Set an expectation that promotions require demonstrated learning engagement (teaching, mentoring, etc.)

• Consider your organisational purpose and values — understand and share how learning supports those values

4. Power the system. Fourth, build enabling infrastructure. This is a longer-term action item but is important to walk the talk. Consider your skills infrastructure, knowledge-sharing systems, AI-enabled learning tools, or custom agents built to allow speed, visibility and accessibility of learning.

• Include everyday access to learning libraries, policies and proprietary thoughtware — allow these to surface in day-to-day work systems (Teams, Microsoft 365, Slack, etc.)

• Establish mobility platforms to enable people to participate in cross-team projects and try new things regularly

5. Learn faster. Finally, assess and iterate. Identify the right KPIs — e.g. increased product and process innovation, employee engagement, performance improvements, learning participation — measure them regularly, and course correct as needed. And throughout, remember core change management principles: leadership engagement, storytelling and incentives to ensure learners are using the new tools available to them.

Winning Culture

We hope this series has been helpful to the business and learning community. The FIFA World Cup crowns one champion, but every organisation can build a winning culture. We’d love to hear what’s worked for you and what lessons you’ve learned along the way.

ABOUT US

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At The Learning Forum, we empower senior leaders from the world’s most influential companies and government agencies to excel in a rapidly changing world. Our mission is to enable high-level peer learning and collaboration within a trusted network, keeping our members at the forefront of innovation and strategic development.

CLO LIFT is an initiative where senior L&D leaders from 20+ major organizations work together to solve the field’s most persistent challenges and shape the future of learning. Rather than chasing trends, members focus on real impact — co-creating thought leadership, establishing industry standards, and delivering measurable value. Partnering with key contributors across the L&D ecosystem, these CLOs are pioneering strategies to prepare the profession for what’s next.

Join pivotal conversations with The Learning Forum, where we don’t just anticipate the future; we actively shape it together.

Revisiting ' From Time To Value' What Changes And What Remains In The Age Of Ai

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Authored by Lisa Christensen (McKinsey & Company) and Huw Newton-Hill (Attensi)

Things feel like they are moving at breakneck speed, and yet somehow, very little actually feels like it is changing.

Many L&D teams are still doing what they have always done: delivering great programs, preparing faculty, and managing the day-to-day. Organizations derive significant value from their in-person programs. The culture, connection, and sense of belonging they foster are incredibly important. In-person programming is likely to persist, so doing it well matters. In fact, 91% of L&D leaders say human skills are increasingly important. We can’t give up all we have learned about designing and delivering exceptional formal programs.

At the same time, L&D faces a moment of profound disruption. The prospect of an agentic future is both exciting and daunting. There is so much to invent, experiment with, and evaluate. There is no doubt that all organizations are undergoing an AI-enabled operating model transformation, though at different speeds. This offers a unique opportunity for CLOs to break down potential silos and get closer to functions and to how work is done across the business.

We are operating in a “two-speed world”—tasked with maintaining the high-quality experiences our organizations expect today while simultaneously laying the groundwork for a radically different learning ecosystem tomorrow.

Our CLO LIFT working group published From Time to Value in 2024. Given the profound disruption we are all feeling right now, we decided to revisit that framework through the lens of this new two-speed world. We cannot simply stay where we are, but we also don’t need to throw out the playbook. Instead, how might we take the principles that create value and pressure-test them in our new context?

The 5 Principles of Value - Updated

Here is what remains the same, what has changed, and what it means for our next phase of L&D’s evolution.

1. Strategic Alignment

• What remains the same: The entire body of work of the L&D function must be in sync with the company’s overall priorities.

• What has changed: Strategic velocity has increased, skills volatility is higher than ever, and all organizations are challenged by an AI-enabled operating model transformation. In this context, learning cannot trail behind strategy; it must be truly embedded in the transformation as it happens.

• What this means for leaders: L&D needs to be embedded in the AI-enabled operating model transformation – if you are not, you are trailing it. To support this, you need to shift to continuous, dynamic alignment cycles that keep pace with the business. A good place to start is to build an AI literacy or readiness benchmark that should be part of the transformation plan.

2. Relevance to the Individual

• What remains the same: Good learning science still holds true. People engage when learning helps them solve an immediate problem or when they believe in its long-term value. Skill development must be practical, aligned with business priorities, and learner agency matters.

• What has changed: There are tons of new skills, expanding by the day, making it incredibly hard for leaders and employees to know what’s relevant. Understandably, technical skills have taken immediate priority; however, we know long-term human skills are most important in transformations. Simultaneously, expectations around personalization are rising dramatically. An agentic future is enabled only by deep personalization. On a positive note, we already see employees embracing the opportunity to use AI to learn and practice new skills.

• What this means for leaders: Generic, recommended course libraries are no longer sufficient. We need dynamic, responsive solutions that adapt to the individual’s immediate context. We recommend building expertise within high-visibility functions where AI has a significant impact on talent (for example, Finance) and partnering with those functions to drive transformation. Getting close to where work is changing will allow you to prove value and focus on human skills to support the change.

3. Quality of Experience

• What remains the same: Content consumption does not drive behavior change. Practice, feedback, application, repetition, and reflection are still the non-negotiables of mastery.

• What has changed: AI has fundamentally altered what is possible from both an experience and an experimentation perspective. We can now scale realistic practice and feedback in ways that were previously impossible.

• What this means for leaders: You must move beyond completion metrics as markers of quality and toward creating new, granular skills-practice data that helps quantify skills progression. Be intentional about your GenAI strategy. Don’t let “AI-generated content at scale” become the strategy. Use GenAI mainly for high-quality practice: simulations, role-play, coaching, multilingual adaptation, feedback, and in-work performance support.

4. Long-Term Continuity

• What remains the same: Mastery requires repetition and spacing. Careers (and career capabilities) unfold over years, not within isolated, episodic programs. There is a profound compounding effect of experience, intentional practice and reflection.

• What has changed: Skill half-life has shortened dramatically. McKinsey research indicates that 70% of skills used in most jobs will change by 2030[1]. Fortunately, technology is finally enabling true continuous, in-the-flow development rather than just episodic events.

• What this means for leaders: Stop thinking in programs and start thinking in systems. Consider the development space across both formal learning and daily workflow, and find ways to integrate directly with workflow development teams. Identify opportunities to align talent development strategy with the business’s long-term strategy. This is critical to ensure we continue to invest in offerings with unattributable benefits.

5. Breadth of Opportunity

• What remains the same: Access influences equity. People need generous, continuous access to learning, with considerate onramps, to develop over the course of their careers.

• What has changed: We now have the potential for significantly more access and highly personalized learning. However, motivation and mindsets toward AI are extremely varied. If we do not meet people where they are, there is a potential downside. AI can actually exacerbate existing equity gaps if deployment isn’t managed intentionally.

• What this means for leaders: You must intentionally architect greater access to learning directly into the workflow to ensure the divide doesn’t widen. We suggest building a baseline of mindset and motivation to ensure everyone can participate, as well as identifying internal or external heroes who represent what can be achieved.

The First Phase of Evolution

How long will this specific phase of the L&D evolution last? We have absolutely no idea. Things are moving faster than anyone can accurately predict, which means waiting for a fi

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alized “best practice” playbook is a risk we simply cannot afford. The disruption we are facing is profound, but the cognitive science of how humans learn remains our rudder. We don’t need to have the entire future figured out today. We simply need the courage to protect the experiences that truly drive value, get close to where the change is happening, and create the space to figure out what comes next.

¹ https://researchre.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/LinkedIn-Workplace-Learning-Report-2025.pdf

[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/agents-robots-and-us-skill-partnerships-in-the-age-of-ai

CLO Lift: The Math Of Learning Part I Article April 3, 2026

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Executive Summary:

This article challenges one of the most common - and least examined - claims in Learning & Development: that organizations are “closing skill gaps at scale.” Drawing on complementary perspectives from learning measurement and organizational reality, Sandra Loughlin and Noah Rabinowitz argue that most gap narratives collapse under scrutiny because they lack a defined standard and credible evidence of change. A gap cannot exist without two distinct points of comparison: the level of performance the business actually requires (the denominator) and what employees can demonstrably do today (the numerator).

Sandra and Noah present a rigorous framework that clearly differentiates three frequently misunderstood gaps: the baseline gap, which measures the distance between existing capability and the required standard; the remaining gap, which persists after an intervention; and the learning delta, representing the tangible change in capability over time. Notably, it is only the learning delta that demonstrates whether actual learning has taken place, while the baseline and remaining gaps indicate whether business standards have been achieved. By failing to make these distinctions, organizations often confuse mere activity for genuine impact and accept compelling narratives in place of concrete evidence.

Critically, the article shows that many apparent “skill gaps” are in fact condition gaps - misaligned incentives, broken processes, poor tools, or cultural signals that prevent capable people from performing to the standard. Treating these as training problems wastes time and money while leaving outcomes unchanged. The article's conclusion is direct. If you cannot verify the numerator against a business-relevant denominator, you do not get to claim you are closing the gap. This discipline moves L&D from content delivery to defensible capability engineering, where learning earns its place by solving real problems rather than telling convincing stories.

Part I:

Sandra Loughlin and I keep returning to the same conversation about L&D, and it is not a superficial one--our concern is about the core value of the function. Somewhere along the way, the phrase “closing skill gaps at scale” became socially acceptable in our beloved field. More than acceptable, really, almost required. It appears in strategy decks, vendor pitches, leadership updates, thought leadership, and funding requests as if its meaning were self-evident. And yet that confidence tends to collapse the moment you ask even the most ordinary and basic follow-up questions. Which gaps, exactly? For whom? Relative to what standard? Verified how? In far too many rooms, the language is polished, confident, and strangely immune to evidence.

Sandra and I arrive at this problem from different directions, but we keep meeting in the same place. Sandra has spent decades insisting on something foundational from the learning and measurement sciences: impact claims require change against a documented standard. Not best in class. Not above average. Not better than peers. A much more grounded question: relative to a given standard, what can the person do now that they could not do before? This is what she calls “the delta,” or change, of learning - a documented change in knowledge, skills, mindset, or behaviors over time. Without that anchor, claims of improvement are simply narratives, not evidence.

My vantage point is different, but the destination is the same. I have watched organizations enthusiastically chase skills trends, buy content libraries, adopt taxonomies, and borrow generic competency language while quietly ignoring the reality that determines whether any of it matters: the business context itself. Strategy, market position, operating model, incentives, tools, workload, culture, and the lived conditions under which behavior is expected to change and sustain. All of that determines whether a capability is real, relevant, and usable. When those two perspectives meet, the conclusion is almost embarrassingly obvious. If we want to talk about gaps, we must have two things to compare. Just like a line must have two points, a gap must have two sides; it’s non-negotiable. For us, those sides are:

1) What is the standard the business needs employees to meet - what level of knowledge, skill, behavior, or mindset is necessary for the employee to be effective in their role?

2) Where is the employee currently relative to that standard?

This is a simple ratio. The denominator is what the business needs someone to know and be able to do. The numerator is what they actually know and can do now (today).

That sounds straightforward, but it is a little more complex in practice. Once training or other interventions enter the picture, there are not just one but three distinct gaps that reveal one learning delta. Collapsing them into a single story is where much of the field loses its footing.

The first gap is the difference between the numerator and denominator at baseline - before any learning has taken place. The second gap is found between numerator and denominator at the end of the learning period. That tells you how far the employee still is from the standard. The third gap is the difference between the numerator at baseline and the numerator at summative measurement. That third gap reveals the learning delta, how much and in what direction employee capability changed over time.

A practical example makes this point clearer.

Consider a regional bank seeking to improve the quality of small-business lending decisions made by frontline relationship managers. Leadership says there is a “credit underwriting skills gap” because loan losses are rising, approval quality is inconsistent, and newer managers seem less confident in structuring deals. The reflexive response is familiar: assign a curriculum, require completion, run a workshop, and then report that the organization is “closing underwriting skill gaps at scale.” But that claim only becomes meaningful if the gap is defined properly.

Start with the denominator. What, specifically, does the business need a relationship manager to know and be able to do? Not “be better at underwriting.” Not “demonstrate financial acumen.” The actual standard might look more like this: given a lending scenario involving a small business customer, the manager must be able to identify key risk variables, interpret cash flow correctly, surface material red flags, recommend an appropriate loan structure, and justify that recommendation in a way that aligns with policy and risk tolerance. That is a real denominator because it is observable, judgeable, verifiable, and tied to business consequences.

Then assess the numerator, the actual current state, against that same standard. Perhaps managers are given three realistic lending cases and evaluated against explicit criteria. The results show that only 35 percent can consistently identify repayment risk correctly, only 28 percent catch collateral weaknesses, and only 22 percent make recommendations fully aligned with policy. That is the first delta: the baseline gap between current capability and required performance.

Now suppose the bank launches a targeted intervention: guided practice using real cases, manager-led calibration sessions, decision simulations, and feedback on actual credit memos. After eight weeks, managers are reassessed using equivalent scenarios and the same scoring criteria. Now 61 percent identify repayment risk correctly, 55 percent catch collateral weaknesses, and 48 percent make policy-aligned recommendations. That is the third delta: the learning delta. Capability has moved, employees have learned. But notice what has not happened. The standard still has not been met. More than half the population remains below the required level on critical elements. They learned, but the second gap was not closed.

And then the story becomes more useful still. A review of manager interviews and workflow data shows that even stronger performers are often rushing decisions because the sales process rewards speed, documentation is fragmented across systems, and senior lenders routinely override coaching conversations in favor of volume targets. In other words, part of what initially appeared to be a capability gap is also a conditions gap. The system is actively undermining the behavior the bank claims to want.

This is exactly why framing learning in terms of ratios matters. At baseline, there was a real gap. After the training program, there was real improvement. But there was also still a remaining gap, and part of that remaining gap had nothing to do with what employees knew or could do - more training wouldn’t move the needle. Without that diagnostic discipline, the bank could have declared victory based on completions, sentiment, or test scores while the actual lending standard remained unmet.

That is the difference between delivering learning and proving capability. This is also why the ratio is not just a clever framework or a consulting trick. It is a forcing function. It forces the business to specify what counts. It forces L&D to measure against something real. And it forces everyone involved to confront the possibility that the problem may not be a lack of learning at all.

Coming Soon: In Section 2, we will show what it actually takes to prove a skill gap - by defining the required standard, measuring what people can really do today, and resisting shortcuts like surveys, heat maps, or generic “future-ready” labels. It will offer a practical discipline for distinguishing true capability gaps from system and conditions problems before investing in learning.

About the Authors

We extend our gratitude to all the authors and thought partners for their invaluable contributions to The Learning Forum’s CLO LIFT initiative. Their combined expertise and insights have been instrumental in shaping the content, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of.

The Learning Forum + CLO LIFT Leaders

Brian Hackett, Founder and CEO, The Learning Forum

Meighan Hackett Poritz, Co-founder and Managing Director, The Learning Forum

Sandra Loughlin, PhD, Chief Learning Scientist, EPAM Systems

Noah Rabinowitz, Sr. Director Team & Org Effectiveness, Royal Caribbean Group

Kati Clement-Frazier, Director Learning & Development, DaVita Kidney Care

Michele Graham, President, Intel+Learn, Amplity

Emily Lin, Chief Learning Officer, Mastercard

Andrea MacKechnie, Senior Vice President - Global Talent, Learning & Leadership Development Expert, Marsh McLennan

It’s that too many of the same problems keep showing up—year after year, company after company—without moving the needle. We are investing heavily, yet we lack confidence in the impact. We are drowning in content, yet we aren’t sure if people are learning what matters. We are chasing “transformative” trends, yet we lack the standards to know what “good” actually looks like.

These aren’t just implementation glitches. They are generational problems baked into how the L&D function operates.

Enter CLO LIFT

CLO LIFT is a practitioner-led initiative convened by

The Learning Forum that brings together Chief Learning Officers and senior leaders from major global organizations.

This initiative emerged from the CLO Council, where the three of us—Brian, Meighan, and Noah—began comparing notes. Between us, we have spent decades running corporate universities, advising CEOs, and sitting in the CLO seat.

We noticed that when the doors were closed and the vendors were gone, leaders started saying the quiet parts out loud.

Across industries and organizations, we kept hearing the same questions:

• “We’re investing heavily. Why don’t we feel confident about the impact?”

• “Every vendor claims they’re transformative. How do we know who’s actually good?”

• “We’re drowning in content and platforms. Are people learning what truly matters?”

• “We’ve been talking about these issues for ten years. Why aren’t they moving?”

We realized that no single organization can solve this alone. We need a collective effort to confront the systemic challenges that technology has failed to resolve.

Its purpose is simple—and difficult:

To work collectively on the most persistent, systemic challenges in corporate learning and development—challenges that decades of trends, technologies, and frameworks have failed to resolve.

The Challenges We Are Taking On

From the beginning, CLO LIFT has been shaped by practitioners not vendors, analysts, or abstract models.

Together, experienced CLOs are wrestling with challenges such as:

• Time to Learn
  How learning earns priority time and credibility in organizations that relentlessly measure everything else.

• Surging Skills
  How skills development can keep pace with business change—not lag years behind it.

• Governance as a Strategic Enabler
  How L&D is structured and governed to align with strategy, accountability, and measurable outcomes.

• Learning How to Learn
  Mastering this meta-capability so organizations can close skill gaps at scale, under time pressure, in the AI era.

• The Evolving CLO Mandate
  Redefining the CLO’s role as a strategic partner responsible for enabling people to adapt how work gets done—reliably, measurably, and fast.

• Measurement That Actually Means Something
  Moving beyond activity metrics and sentiment scores toward evidence of real capability change.

These are not academic debates.
They are the conditions under which our credibility lives or dies.

Learning as a Business Lever

• Define enduring problems clearly—without hiding behind buzzwords

• Ask harder questions about what “good” actually looks like in L&D

• Build shared language and standards we can stand behind as a profession

• Create tools, articles, frameworks, and forums that improve real practice

A few principles matter deeply to us:

• Practitioner-led, not vendor-driven
  This is not a sponsorship vehicle or sales channel. The people in the room own the outcomes.

• No commercial incentive
  CLO LIFT is not a product. There is nothing to buy. The return we care about is clearer thinking and better practice.

• Honest about constraints
  Budgets, politics, time, and attention are real. We work inside those realities—not around them.

• Constructive by design
  We will critique the circus of trend decks and magical solutions—but only to build something better in their place.

Progress So Far

We are building practical frameworks CLOs can use with stakeholders. We are creating safe spaces to admit, “We tried this, and it failed.” We are shifting thought leadership back to the practitioners in the arena, rather than those on the stage.

We want to move the profession from “We hope this worked” to “We know what we’re aiming for, and we know how to measure it.”

• We crowdsourced challenge areas from senior learning leaders

• We prioritized problems that persist regardless of technology or fashion

• We began co-creating articles, papers, and tools rooted in lived experience

• We hosted working sessions where peers pressure-test ideas that actually carry stakes

Our Vision for Whats Next

We’re not naïve enough to think one community will “fix” L&D.

But we do believe we can:

• Clarify what good looks like in learning and leadership development

• Build practical frameworks CLOs can use with teams, stakeholders, and vendors

• Create safe spaces to say, “We tried this—and it didn’t work.”

• Shift thought leadership back to practitioners in the arena, not just those on the stage

Ultimately, we want to help the profession move from:

“We hope this worked”
to
“We know the business outcomes we’re aiming for, how we’re measuring them, and where we need to improve.”

An Invitation

If this resonates—
If you’re tired of the noise—
If you care about learning as both a strategic lever and a human obligation—

We’d like to invite you into the work. We’re especially eager to connect with:

• Chief Learning Officers and Talent Management leaders

• Heads of Learning and Leadership Development who are close to real execution

• Practitioners willing to wrestle with nuance, not chase shiny objects

If you are tired of the noise and ready to do the work, we invite you to join us. Let’s raise the bar, together.

With respect for the work you do,

Brian Hackett
Meighan Hackett
Noah Rabinowitz

On behalf of CLO LIFT — a practitioner-led effort to raise the bar for learning and development, together.

During the recent meeting at Harvard, our CLOLIFT working group wrestled this problem into clearer shape. We debated “learning to learn,” argued about the boundaries of L&D, and got honest about where motivation and performance management do more for knowledge transfer than yet another course. What follows is the summary of our takeaways from that conversation.

We Need to Start Thinking (and Speaking) About Delta (Δ)

We talk about skills gaps all the time but what do we really mean? Talk of gaps is cheap until we do the math:

• Denominator: the full set of skills required to execute the business strategy, individually and collectively

• Numerator: the skills the organization actually has today, individually and collectively

• The Gap (Δ): Denominator − Numerator.

Most companies haven’t defined the denominator with enough precision, and almost none have a living numerator. As a result, L&D spends too much time optimizing the third mile of a marathon no one mapped—polishing delivery without clarity on distance.

Here’s the reframe: HR’s job is to close the organization’s skills gap through hiring, mobility, learning, and so on. L&D’s job is to help individuals close the skills gaps within themselves. If we can’t see the denominator and numerator, we’re guessing and employees are, too.

Before Modality: Preconditions For Success

We over-index on training because it’s inside our four L&D walls. But training only works when some conditions are present:

1. Relevance: Training can only address issues arising from knowledge gaps. If the root cause of the business challenge is anything else, training just wastes everyone’s time.

2. Transparency: People must know which skills matter and where they stand relative to those skills. No visibility, no agency.

3. Motivation: People must want to close the delta. This is engineered largely outside L&D—through performance management, leadership expectations, incentives, and local culture.

4. Environment: The skills people need to develop must be, at minimum, not discouraged outside of training. If employees learn something but have to deal with misaligned processes, tools, incentives, and so on, they won’t apply what has been learned to their jobs.

Skip these and even great design can yield negative ROI: we consume time without producing applied skill. That’s how L&D loses credibility—quietly, by converting attention into motionless metrics. We need to start being clearer with our constituents about the conditions required to see return on training investments.

Negative ROI Is Real (And Preventable)

Someone said it plainly in the meeting and it stuck with us: when we deploy training without the necessary preconditions—no transparency, low motivation, no time—we create negative ROI. We spend hours and money, we get zero transfer, and we erode trust.

What “Learning to Learn” Really Means

We went in circles on this because “learning to learn” gets used to mean everything and therefore nothing. Ultimately, we realized learning has several distinct meanings:

• Inputs: designing and surfacing experiences—formal and informal—that accelerate and de-risk the meta-skill for busy adults doing real work.

• Process: noticing a gap, setting a goal, locating credible resources, connecting new to prior knowledge, practicing deliberately, seeking feedback, reflecting, and iterating.

• Outputs: changes in skills, behaviors, mindsets, and ways of working; the outcome we’re helping individuals and the business achieve

All three matter. A highly motivated learner who struggles to find effective resources to learn from struggles to improve. A beautiful learning product handed to a disengaged learner wastes everyone’s time. The win is alignment and terminology hygiene, and we vowed to clean up our language and thinking.

If we had to teach “learning to learn” tomorrow, we would orient around the process and emphasize a handful of durable practices: critical source analysis, memory strategies; deliberate practice on real tasks; analogical reasoning to move from familiar to novel contexts; immediate, specific feedback; and short reflection loops. None of this is new. The hard part is doing it under the time pressure of modern work, which is why the organization has to create room for it and why L&D must pay special attention to helping employees develop better awareness and metacognition.

Implications for the CLO Role

If the outcome is gap-closing, the CLO cannot operate as the “content department.” The work is orchestration across four systems:

1. Strategy & Skills: Partner with strategy and business leaders to define the denominator by role, level, and horizon (what we need now and what we’ll need next).

2. Data & Platforms: Ensure a coherent skills graph and clean signals from performance and productivity systems. If the numerator is fantasy, so is the roadmap.

3. Performance & Talent: Wire learning to how we manage performance. Goals, feedback, incentives, and mobility are the engine for motivation and practice opportunities.

4. Design & Delivery: Build and make visible learning opportunities, of course, but recognize they can only move the needle the other three systems are present.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth from our discussion: L&D can’t own motivation and L&D can’t own denominator design alone. Those live in performance management, talent, org design, and the business. If those systems don’t change, our best work still bounces off the glass which means we need to pay more than lip service to partnering with the business and the rest of the Talent organization.

Where This Leaves the CLO

The future of the CLO role is bigger and braver than a catalog. It is systems leadership in service of gap-closing outcomes. That means we spend as much time upstream with strategy and performance as we do downstream with design. It means we measure application and time-to-competence, not attendance and smiles. It means we teach people to learn because it protects the investment we’re asking them to make with their most finite resource.

We believe this is how we move from advocacy to accountability. We’ll still debate terms—“learning to learn,” pedagogy vs. performance support, the mires of skills taxonomies—but the center holds: make the delta visible, make people want to close it, give them the room and the method to do so, and prove that it worked.

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Learning how to learn - The ability to learn quickly, and to translate learning into practice, may be the single most important skill to develop in the AI era. In a world of constant disruption, and accelerating change, it’s the difference between thriving and falling behind.

And yet, if we’re honest, we could be a lot better at helping our people learn how to learn.

Not just employees, but also us, the leaders of learning.

• How many of us can confidently explain to employees how to learn effectively (with or without AI)?

• How many of us can prove to our executive colleagues that employees actually learned something in our programs, and that it translated into measurable business value?

Why the Old Paradigm is Broken

For decades, corporate learning has been organized around inputs: how many courses we launch, how many hours people spend, how many “graduates” we produce.

This approach may have been tolerable in a slower, more predictable world. But it simply doesn’t work in an era where skills must be acquired, applied, and adapted in real time.

The gap between what employees need to learn and what traditional L&D actually delivers is widening.

And unless we change the paradigm, L&D risks becoming irrelevant at the very moment the world needs it most.

A New Paradigm: Learning How to Learn

What we need is a paradigm rooted in science, not slogans. Grounded in evidence, not expedience.

The core of that paradigm is learning how to learn. Not just delivering content, but helping people master the meta-skills that allow them to:

• Rapidly acquire new skills.

• Apply them in the messy flow of work.

• Reflect, adapt, and transfer them across contexts.

• Use AI not as a shortcut, but as an amplifier of their thinking and performance.

As Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, put it recently in Athens: “One thing we’ll know for sure is you’re going to have to continually learn throughout your career.”

That requires a workforce fluent in the meta-skills of learning how to learn and critical thinking — capacities that cut across every industry, role, and level.

The CLO LIFT Blueprint

At CLO LIFT, a collaborative of Chief Learning Officers from some of the world’s leading organizations, we are working to build that blueprint. Our mission is to move beyond content libraries and conference slogans to create standards, practices, and ecosystems that actually accelerate learning in the flow of work.

The organizations we admire don’t treat learning as a silo. They treat it as a living system, deeply embedded in how work gets done. That means:

• Leadership that signals permission to experiment.

• Routines that normalize reflection.

• Data systems that measure behavior change, not just completions.

• Talent pathways that enable movement, not just measurement.

This is the direction we must go if L&D is to remain relevant and essential in the era of AI.

Join the Conversation

We don’t have all the answers. But we know the old answers aren’t enough. That’s why we’re asking you to weigh in.

• What topics about learning how to learn should we explore?

• What myths or misconceptions need to be called out?\

• What aspects of effective learning environments should we amplify?

Join us on this journey.

CLO LIFT is a project led by senior CLOs at global companies, in partnership with Docebo, Udemy, and Harvard University, hosted by The Learning Forum.

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In the AI era, the roles of the CLO and CHRO have never been more vital as they navigate the evolving intersection of technology, talent, and organizational growth.

The ideas shared here are not solely our own. They come from the Fortune 500 and FTSE HR leaders who are part of The Learning Forum, a research and networking organization where senior leaders from the world’s largest companies and key government agencies engage in confidential peer learning within a high-trust network. We’ve done our best to capture their insights as we understood them, and we trust they’ll guide us if we miss the mark.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not just reshaping industries but fundamentally transforming how the way we work. By driving augmentation, automation, and the rise of digital workers, traditional jobs and roles are being redefined, and new ways of working are emerging. This presents a dual challenge for businesses: adapting to AI-driven changes while seizing opportunities to optimize organizational structures, workforce strategies, people development, and cultural alignment.

Augmentation, Automation, and Digital Workers

AI has the potential to enhance human capabilities by taking over repetitive and time-consuming tasks, enabling employees to focus on higher-value, creative, and strategic work. As these technologies mature, organizations are rethinking people development, workforce planning, and work design. Workforce strategies are no longer limited to people; they must now incorporate AI assistants and digital workers as essential contributors to enterprise goals. This transformation requires leaders to develop a shared understanding of tasks, skills, and roles, fostering a balance between human and AI collaboration to drive efficiency and innovation.

Employees as Self-Directed Learners

Large Language Models (LLMs) empower employees to take charge of their own development. Rather than depending on structured training programs, workers can now access on-demand training, coaching, development tips, and performance support. These technologies allow employees to bridge skill gaps in real time, adjust to new responsibilities, and stay ahead in a changing workplace.

Additionally, employees are increasingly becoming active contributors to organizational learning. With AI-enhanced platforms, they can create and share knowledge, develop their own training materials, and establish best practices for their teams. This peer-driven, dynamic approach to learning nurtures a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

There is growing concern that L&D teams will need to oversee the surge of AI-powered content generation, yet no viable solution currently exists to manage this effectively. Some question whether the effort is worthwhile, as employees already leverage AI tools to enhance their ability to work faster and more efficiently.

The Role of the CLO

The Chief Learning Officer (CLO) is at the forefront of addressing the challenges and opportunities brought by AI in the workplace. As traditional learning models give way to work-embedded development, the CLO’s responsibilities are evolving to include:

• Redefining Learning Strategies: Shifting from static training programs to dynamic, AI-driven systems that deliver learning through work processes.

• Leveraging AI for Personalization: Deploying AI tools to create tailored learning experiences that address individual employee needs while aligning with organizational goals.

• Fostering Knowledge Sharing: Designing frameworks and systems that empower employees to create and disseminate insights, enabling a self-sustaining culture of learning.

• Embedding Development into the Workforce DNA: Ensuring learning is integrated into every aspect of work, enabling continuous skill-building and adaptation.

The CLO must lead and act as a bridge between emerging AI capabilities and the organization’s need to foster human potential, ensuring that employees remain resilient, skilled, and adaptable.

The Role of the CHRO

The Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) plays a complementary and equally vital role in leading organizations through this transformation. While the CLO focuses on learning and development, the CHRO oversees the broader workforce strategy, ensuring that human resources initiatives align seamlessly with business objectives. The CHRO’s key responsibilities include:

• Integrating AI into Workforce Planning: Develop strategies that incorporate AI agents and digital workers alongside human employees, optimizing efficiency and fostering innovation.

• Driving Workforce Optimization: Align human and AI resources to meet the evolving organization's evolving needs, redefining roles and responsibilities as necessary to stay competitive.

• Building a Unified Workforce Strategy: Promote collaboration between employees and AI tools to create a cohesive, productive, and future-ready work environment.

• Promoting Change Leadership: Lead cultural alignment by fostering understanding and acceptance of AI as a partner in the workforce, ensuring a smooth transition during this transition.

By embracing these responsibilities, the CHRO ensures that organizations are not only prepared for the challenges of AI integration but are also poised to unlock its full potential.

Final Thoughts

Together, the CLO and CHRO form a critical leadership team, steering the strategic, operational, and cultural dimensions of workforce transformation. If done right, their partnership can ensure that integrating AI into the workplace enhances productivity, creates meaningful on-the-job development opportunities, and empowers employees to thrive in the evolving world of work.

Integrating AI into the workforce is far more than a technological shift—it is a strategic imperative. Organizations that embrace this transformation can unlock unparalleled efficiency, foster innovation, unlock new opportunities for people development, and enhance collaboration.

By aligning workforce optimization and planning with AI capabilities, businesses can position themselves for long-term success in an AI-driven world. As AI continues to reshape the nature of work, the roles of the CLO and CHRO are indispensable. Together, they must reimagine workforce strategies, embed AI into the fabric of work, and prepare their companies to navigate the demands of a rapidly evolving workplace. By taking these steps, they not only future proof their organizations but also empower employees to excel.

Discover More from The Learning Forum

If this topic resonates with you, we invite you to explore these resources.

The Strategic Role of CLOs and CHROs in the Age of AI

We are launching a new peer group designed to explore the challenges and opportunities discussed in this article. This group will be a forum for senior leaders to share experiences, exchange ideas, and co-create strategies for thriving in an AI-driven workplace. Join us to be part of these forward-thinking conversations.

CLO LIFT

Our CLO LIFT program brings together senior HR leaders to collaboratively address the critical challenges facing today’s learning and development landscape. This practitioner-led initiative provides a unique platform to connect with peers, share insights, develop actionable solutions, and help shape strategies that deliver meaningful impact across the broader L&D community.

One of our 2025 Focus Areas includes The Future Role of the CLO.

What are your thoughts?

The opportunity for HR to make a strategic impact has never been more significant. The challenge is identifying the steps that must be taken today to propel the organization forward. We’d love to hear your thoughts—what actions do you believe are essential for success

For the first time in its history, a large manufacturing company set up a steering committee for the learning and development (L&D) function. This was a breakthrough.

The company's top leadership finally recognized that its success depended on developing its workforce.

An executive vice president sat on the committee, representing a number of key business units. When he learned that the L&D budget was allocated evenly across the product lines, he protested. "Just two of these products generate 80% of our profit. Why aren't we investing heavily in those two?"

The EVP's comment completely changed the focus of the L&D function. The committee's discussion now reflected its mandate to set priorities. What would they spend their money on? What would give them the highest-value return? Instead of the Chief Learning Officer (CLO) making decisions in isolation, there was now a team in place whose members were prepared to assess the company's training needs and direct resources accordingly.

In the following year, skill levels measurably increased, and so did profits. The new governance model, with a committee allocating funds, positioned L&D as a true enabler of the business.

A governance structure in L&D is a move from implicit to explicit practices. It brings rigor and structure to decision-making practices that would otherwise be nebulous and ill-defined. It is a recognition that L&D is, fundamentally, a strategic function - equally critical for the organization's growth and for its survival in turbulent times.

As L&D professionals, we need strong governance structures to keep pace with the accelerating speed of change. Many of us have spent our careers delivering workshops and programs. Now we are expected to respond to the impact of shifting technologies, geopolitical events, and new economic realities, all of which require rapid reskilling at scale.

"The pace of change has never been this fast," said Justin Trudeau at Davos in 2018, referring to world events, "and it will never be this slow again." That turned out to be an understatement. Since then, humanity has gone through some of the biggest changes in its history - a global pandemic, the rise of artificial intelligence, and massive geopolitical change, all in just a few years.

The new pace of change directly affects the L&D function, at the most granular level. In the past, for instance, a company's sales curriculum might stay the same for 4 or 5 years. Now, it is continuously revised as the product mix evolves, new technology comes on board, and supply chains shift. When confronted with changes in leadership, strategy, processes, and priorities, CLOs must be able to respond swiftly and decisively.

Approaches to L&D governance will vary from one company to another. However, four elements are always critical: a common oversight structure and process for decision-making; a shared set of L&D design principles that apply throughout the organization; a means for connecting L&D leaders and their key constituents throughout the organization; and mechanisms for continuous improvement.

1. Oversight and decision-making

Any comprehensive L&D function must make enterprise-wide decisions. It must ensure the learning and development initiatives align with organizational goals and standards.

Rather than "taking orders" from separate stakeholders within the company, it must be strategic: Determining the right target audiences for each learning solution and making sure those audiences are reached.

In the L&D system, oversight and structure determine decision rights and accountability. Who is responsible for setting standards for the whole L&D function and making sure they meet the criteria? Who is responsible for each offering, ensuring that it is aligned with the company's strategic purpose? Each domain within the company may have its own answer, depending on what type of decisions are needed. Several models are emerging:

• A company-wide steering committee, overseeing all L&D activity. In companies where L&D is recognized for its strategic value, this committee may sit one level below the executive team. Generally, the business leaders for prominent products

  and services are represented. Since it covers a range of business, the committee must take the company's overall needs into account, and not just one or two products.

  • At a large biopharmaceutical company, this type of L&D governance structure was put in place when the global CLO brought together the heads of learning for each of the business units and functions. They had minimal guidance or structure beyond a set of company-wide people imperatives, one of which was: "Create a culture of lifelong learning." The global CLO, who chaired the new Learning Council, took care not to impose any purpose or direction. Instead, at their first meeting, the members "stormed and formed" to identify a vision for their collective efforts. It was clear that all would have a say in what their teams could do together, and that the Council, not any individual, would set the policies. This created early engagement and buy-in. It enabled the team to achieve some early enterprise-wide wins together, such as launching a new learning experience platform and a single approach to skill development for people leaders.

• Matrix structures for accountability and direction. An L&D decision-making committee might be placed within the HR function, synchronizing L&D more closely with recruiting and promotion priorities. There could also be "dotted line" approval links to business units and relevant functions. These structures can integrate L&D more closely with the rest of the organization, but they also carry the risk of bureaucracy. Those links can become approval requirements that slow down decisions.

  • In one such committee, where the first session was locked in debate, two members took charge. The CLO and the executive who represented product lines demanded and received decision rights. They also took on the responsibility of managing discussion: ensuring that all voices were heard. The CLO came to the table with a prepared storyline: "We've confirmed several skill-building needs this quarter, and we've proposed some new programs to meet them." If the other leaders on the committee agreed, the CLO could then lean on them to support those offerings and go back to the L&D organization with a clear overall direction.

• The CLO and L&D function as the central source of authority. In these cases, the organization's support for the CLO - in terms of approval, budget, and information - should be clear. Advisors and stakeholders throughout the company should be available, to ensure that the L&D function is aware of the priorities.

  • One large, multinational financial services organization set up its governance

    system this way. The CLO remained the source of authority, but he asked every L&D leader with an idea to present it to a representative panel of senior leaders from around the company. About half of the originator proposals make it through the first round. They are asked to make revisions based on panel feedback and come back to the panel for final approval. This rigorous process benefits both the content originators and the content recipients.

Whatever the governance structure may be, its primary means of establishing authority is the budget. A large company may devote $50-500 million per year to L&D. The governance structure should allocate that money according to business priorities. The rationale should be visible: it should showcase how L&D initiatives are seamlessly integrated into the organization's strategic objectives, actively driving tangible business results, and responding flexibly as the world changes around it.

2. L&D design principles

Governance also involves a system of explicit principles for the L&D function. These are guidelines for designing learning experiences, providing consistency in the quality and content, and applicable to different parts of the world or service offerings. Design standards ensure that all content is of high quality, meets established requirements, comes from reputable vendors, and is consistent across the organization By codifying and articulating these principles, the L&D function also establishes a common checkpoint that everyone can discuss and ultimately with which the entire company can align.

The principles will typically reflect the interests of many stakeholders in a company: administrators, instructors, learners, and other employees. They cover the strategic learning objectives, monitoring the progress towards achieving these objectives, and ensuring that learning resources are used responsibly and effectively.

Specific principles might include:

• Guardrails for maintaining quality: Good governance sets and maintains high standards for learning experience design, delivery, and assessment - -contributing to the overall quality and effectiveness of the learning initiatives.

• Mechanisms for mitigating risk: Training must cover compliance, legal issues, and ethical concerns, and governance must ensure adherence to policies and regulations to minimize reputational risks and legal liabilities.

• Content: Principles can articulate criteria for topics and emphasis. This must align with the organizational goals and standards.

• Transparency and Simplicity: Principles can clarify how decisions are made and

  how resources are allocated. This builds trust, engagement, and buy-in among

  stakeholders and constituents in the company. Principles can also help L&D "keep it simple," by stating the priorities and methods in plain language in an accessible central place.

• Empowerment and Engagement: The principles cover the overall learning

  environment: an inclusive system, a catalyst for individual and collective growth,

  and a source of psychological safety and employee engagement.

• Collaboration and Partnership: Principles can explicitly promote collaboration

  across business units and with selected outside organizations like universities, thus aligning L&D with broader talent strategies for maximum impact.

• Measurable Impact: Principles should establish metrics and KPIs that will be used to assess the impact of L&D initiatives, providing insights for continuous improvement and demonstrating the value of L&D to the organization.

3. Relationships with constituent groups

The knowledge in most organizations is not confined to top leadership. Managers at every level have ideas about their talent needs going forward. Their insights and observations are critically important, and they may represent constituents throughout the organization.

A network of established relationships is thus a critical aspect of L&D governance. It's tempting to frame this network as the global executives with budgetary and staff approval. However, learning is not always top of mind for them; it's one of many aspects of the business they must consider. This network is composed of a broader base of constituents: the people in every organization who understand the relationship between skills and success. They need to be more formally brought into the L&D orbit.

Typically, there are four types of constituents:

• Sponsors of L&D initiatives are typically the local and line executives who are committed to the growth and development of the workforce in their domains. Having their sponsorship is a table stake for L&D. Without it, the function lacks the necessary support to thrive. The network must explicitly include them.

• Champions of learning are eager, visible participants in the skills development process. They may be line leaders, technical specialists, or enthusiastic members of teams in fast-growing fields. They are typically in a good position to influence others, and some may end up becoming teachers, mentors, or coaches themselves.

• HR business partners and Talent Centers of Excellence can help drive the

  integration of learning initiatives with broader talent management strategies. These could include succession planning, performance management, and employee engagement. Stronger integration with people-related functions ensures that L&D efforts contribute directly to building a competent and competitive workforce.

• Independent L&D groups include the ad hoc "enablement" and business-embedded L&D teams that crop up within many companies, often within local business units or HR functions. They serve as the leaders for the development of technical or specialized skills unique to their part of the business. Though these groups fall out of the centralized L&D ecosystem, they play an important role.

  Challenges arise when they are not aligned with the center. It is in the CLO's best interest to include them within some kind of formal governance structure, even if it's as simple as recognizing them and inviting them to participate in joint activities.

  • In one global financial services company, the central L&D function was complemented by myriad local and business-specific learning initiatives. This business-embedded learning ecosystem was not organized or recognized, but the people dedicated to it outnumbered the global L&D team. Its extent was only discovered after a company-wide audit of learning management system (LMS) procurement. Instead of seeking to shut down or absorb these activities, the CLO invited them to voluntarily join a global Community of Practice. This became a robust ongoing group of enthusiastic participants, with a formal Learning Council comprising leaders of technical and local training initiatives. The central L&D team gained access to an expanded army of learning professionals and ambassadors to support global initiatives, pilot new programs, assist with development and early feedback, and help with communication and engagement efforts.

Explicit recognition of constituent groups has many advantages. It enables scalability through coordinated efforts. It also brings more diverse perspectives into the L&D orbit, reduces program duplication, fosters collaboration, and helps CLOs keep up with the organization's needs. All offerings can now be aligned with a core skill-building curriculum, which amplifies the impact of the learner's experience, even if they only attend one part.

These relationships are also early detection "tentacles," bringing in feedback that might not be otherwise available to a CLO. Constituents see new demand for skills before it surfaces elsewhere. They are often among the first to hear when a training session has problems. They tend to know about inadequate follow-through, such as when people are trained in new skills but not placed in any projects that use them.

4. Mechanisms for Continuous Improvement

With the appropriate feedback mechanisms and leadership efforts, the L&D function can continue to raise the value of its offerings. Evaluation, conversation and reflection practices thus become an important aspect of governance structures, even if they are often unseen. They are not just ways of improving learning solutions, but of improving the governance process itself.

After a program is launched, iterative decision processes can allow for continuous learning and improvement. There should be ongoing just-in-time adjustments based on continuous feedback and evolving circumstances. When the L&D function is oriented to continuous improvement, Individuals grow accustomed to ongoing, habitual raising of their skills. Feedback loops are built into the L&D governance process. Change is expected and embraced.

This resilience can help CLOs keep the governance structure stable when there is a shift in top organizational leadership or direction. This so-called "swinging pendulum of transformation and transition" can take place without disrupting L&D, because the practice of continuous improvement makes it easier to pivot.

One way to instill regular feedback loops is to institute regular "after-action reviews" for significant learning endeavors if they don't already exist. These are opportunities for teams of L&D leaders to look back at the feedback and results of each offering and discuss how they might be improved. What went wrong, and why? What went well, and why? How did we demonstrate alignment with business priorities? What evidence exists that people are putting it to use?

CLOs and other learning leaders can also open informal discussions- with stakeholders and within the L&D group- - about the ongoing impact of skill-building efforts. These can become gathering points to talk about the outcomes from specific programs, especially if data is available on how the training influenced decisions. From there, it's possible to talk about the mindset and practices of the L&D teams.

As they face disruption and rapid change, learning professionals must make decisions rapidly, mobilize people, set up designs, and frequently revise offerings based on feedback. This requires a frame of mind oriented toward speed and results. The mindset of the learning leader is itself an aspect of governance. Reflection and individual practice are forms of continuous improvement. They can be thought of as internal governance: adopting a mindset of continuous improvement and fostering a culture of innovation.

Managing Resistance to L&D Governance

CLO Council members identified resistance within the organization as one key challenge in standing up learning governance. This type of resistance can significantly impact a CLO's ability to establish and execute their L&D strategy - making it very difficult to deliver on the promise of being a strategic driver of organizational success.

Overcoming resistance is thus critical in driving the adoption of and engagement in governance processes. Surfacing the reasons behind the resistance provides the CLOs with the information they need to tailor their approach when working to bring others on board. Addressing the resistance is a foundational step to CLOs' and L&D's ability to operate effectively and efficiently, to adapt quickly when necessary, and to deliver on the promise of being a strategic driver of organizational success.

In most companies, there may be several reasons for resistance:

• Business leaders may resist learning governance based on a perception that

  learning is merely an employee benefit, a check-the-box activity, rather than a strategic driver of business outcomes. It is imperative that L&D clearly articulate the benefits of engagement and emphasize the strategic impact investments.

• HR and Talent CoE leaders may also exhibit resistance. With their own priorities and initiatives to focus on, they may perceive learning governance as an additional layer of complexity that distracts from their core responsibilities. Silos across HR and Talent functions can further exacerbate the resistance, as each team operates independently and fails to recognize the importance of their roles. Overcoming these barriers requires recognizing the need for collaboration among HR and Talent functions and ensuring a holistic approach to learning and development.

• L&D teams may feel apprehensive about relinquishing control over learning initiatives or adjusting to new processes and structures. If they don't recognize the value proposition of learning governance, they may perceive it as a bureaucratic hurdle rather than a strategic enabler. Overcoming this resistance requires clear communication, involvement of L&D teams in the design and implementation of governance frameworks, and a focus on demonstrating the benefits of standardized processes for learning outcomes and organizational performance.

The best approach to overcoming resistance to learning governance starts with proactively shaping and communicating the narrative around the value and benefits of governance - in language that resonates with the target audience. Clearly articulating the value and benefits through the lens of the different stakeholders and constituents helps CLOs gain credibility and are more likely to secure their buy-in and engagement.

The benefits include all the elements described throughout this article.

For example: Strategic alignment with the organization's goals will drive tangible results. Better governance will make L&D more flexible and encourage a culture of innovation. It creates an environment where people embrace learning as a catalyst for their own growth. Governance promotes collaboration across business units, leading to more effective programs at lower costs. Finally, it establishes metrics and KPIs to assess the impact of L&D initiatives and continue to improve them. Proactively shaping the narrative around learning governance can go a long way toward bringing people together around the need for better skills. The narrative can describe an agile L&D function, with continuous collaboration and flexible structures: for example, program approval and cost allocation processes that respond swiftly to emerging challenges, opportunities, and changes in the organizational landscape.

When the narrative recognizes stakeholder concerns and paints a credible picture of how they will be addressed, people are more likely to come on board. When the narrative describes results that lead to actual gains, people may become enthusiastic.

The Right Level of Control

Another pivotal challenge for CLOs involves finding the right balance between too much and too little control. It's essential to create governance structures and processes that recognize the need for a strong and unwavering foundation, while maintaining the flexibility required for the organization's diverse needs and dynamics. CLOs must consider consistency versus flexibility, global alignment versus local tailoring, and core integrity versus innovation (see Exhibit 1:)

Exhibit 1: The balances inherent in an L&D governance system

Stakeholders may perceive a highly controlled L&D function as being a hindrance rather than an enabler of business strategy. Overly restrictive controls can stifle creativity and innovation, especially when rigid rules inhibit the exploration of new approaches and ideas. This can lead to stagnant and outdated learning programs that fail to engage the modern learner.

Excessive controls can also lead to a lack of agility and responsiveness in addressing learning needs, slowing down decision-making and implementation, and impeding the organization's ability to quickly adapt to market changes and capitalize on emerging opportunities. They may be perceived as micromanagement, discouraging engagement and collaboration, and push leaders to direct their teams to work outside of the L&D ecosystem. Additionally, too many controls can increase administrative burden, diverting time and resources away from core learning activities and strategic initiatives.

Too few controls also diminish an L&D function's success. This can lead to misalignment of learning efforts and inconsistency in the quality and effectiveness of learning solutions. Inadequate controls can also lead to wasted time, budget, and resources, as companies keep adding ineffective or unnecessary learning activities. Stakeholder engagement and buy-in may suffer. Moreover, without proper controls, there is a greater risk of non-compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies, potentially exposing the organization to legal and reputational risks.

A Call to Action

Many companies talk about creating a learning culture. L&D governance is a means for doing this. Arguably, the most important role of the Chief Learning Officer is to orchestrate that governance process.

As the landscape of business and technology continues to evolve at warp speed, CLOs must establish robust governance systems. Every L&D governance system will be different, but each will be the cornerstone of organizational learning in its company.

Governance serves a catalyst for strategic alignment, resource optimization, stakeholder engagement, risk mitigation, and continuous improvement. It positions L&D for sustainable success in the cyclone of change that surrounds us. Let us embrace the call to action, prioritize learning governance, and actively and relentlessly champion its implementation.

About the Authors

We extend our gratitude to all the authors and thought partners for their invaluable contributions to this article. Their combined expertise and insights have been instrumental in shaping the content, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of the crucial elements for effective L&D Governance.

The Learning Forum + CLO LIFT Leaders

Brian Hackett, Founder and CEO of The Learning Forum

Meighan Hackett Poritz, Co-founder and Managing Director, The Learning Forum

Noah G. Rabinowitz, Chief Learning Officer and CLO LIFT Co-founder

From Time To Value June 11, 2024

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Leaders of learning and development (L&D) efforts in large organizations are often tempted to single out lack of time as the critical limiting factor.

Upskilling and reskilling are difficult and time-consuming. The enterprise needs to commit more learning hours for its employees. Chief Learning Officers (CLO) need to advocate for this. Top executives need to accept it as a business necessity in an age of disruptive technology. However, in exploring this issue, we have found that lack of time is not the most critical factor. The quality of learning has as much or more impact on performance as the quantity of designated time. Some organizations have found that they are already spending the time to raise their skills. In one major professional services firm, for example, an internal survey found that on average, across all levels, professionals spent 30% more time learning than the mandatory minimum - despite the pressures of client deliverables.

Instead of focusing on time, business leaders and L&D professionals need to think more about value. In CLO council dialogues convened by the Learning Forum, five key factors consistently stand out:

1. Strategic alignment: The entire body of work of the L&D function is in sync with the overall priorities of the company.

2. Relevance to the individual: The effort generates real-world skills that raise the

   value of employee time, enhances their careers, and furthers their professional and personal objectives.

3. Quality of experience: The L&D approaches reflect evidence-based understanding of how people learn, and thus favor interactive exercises and more effective learning design rather than lectures.

4. Long-term continuity: Each learning experience is designed as part of a longer continuous developmental pattern, ensuring that employees keep gaining proficiency throughout their careers.

5. Breadth of opportunity: The learning opportunities are available to everyone in the organization who would benefit from them, regardless of status or position.

For an organization to realize the most value from its investment in learning, all five of these factors must be present, working together. Together, they represent an organizational learning philosophy: That a company's full-hearted investment in raising the real-world skills of its employees will be repaid, many times over, in the raised value of the enterprise.

A focus on time tends to distract us from the real benefits of L&D. That's because many of these benefits are unattributable. Attributable benefits are those which can be quantified, tracked, and evaluated relatively easily. Besides time spent learning, these include many KPIs related to return on learning investment such as sales productivity or customer satisfaction scores. They could also include overall measures like the number of certificates granted at the end of a program. Top leaders tend to focus on the attributable benefits because they are more apparent in aggregate, but most seasoned managers are skeptical. They know how easy it is to "tick the box" and complete the test without changing behavior or outcomes.

_______________________________________

Romero, M., & Barberà, E. (2011). Quality of e-learners' time and learning performance beyond quantitative time-on- task. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(5), 125-137. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v125.999

Unattributable benefits may seem more abstract and intangible, but they are often the most important outcomes, especially in the longer term. They include the capabilities of the organization's teams; its cultural resilience and enthusiasm for change; and the continuous advancement of existing employees into more advanced roles. When leaders and employees see tangible results from learning, in the form of higher performance and capability, then they are eager to make time.

The five key factors have always been important, but they are particularly critical today. The pace, scale and complexity of knowledge work is accelerating. The World Economic Forum (WEF) projects that by 2027, 44% of workers' core skills will be disrupted, 42% of business tasks will be automated, and 75% of business expect to adopt new technology. There's a tremendous call for upskilling and reskilling - for tech skills in generative Al, cloud software, cybersecurity, robotics, and biotechnology on one hand, and for human skills in team facilitation, emotional intelligence, and leadership on the other.

The field of corporate training is changing in response. Historically, the L&D function has been siloed and self-contained within most companies, delivering the programs that business leaders ask for explicitly, in an order-taking fashion. Now, the leaders are more open to ideas because they know they need a more skilled workforce. They also want a faster turnaround. Learners expect experiences with the convenience and engagement of an online learning platform.

The vendor landscape has responded with courses that offer many advantages. They manage the technology, elevate learner experience, and provide access to niche expertise.

At the same time, the downsides of off-the-shelf vendor offerings are becoming more apparent. The space is crowded with solutions. each its own system. These offerings increasingly deliver upskilling online without always considering the risks (for example, the risk of hallucinations or copyright infringement). The costs can add up, many programs fail to deliver results, the menu of courses is fragmented, there is little regard for fundamental principles, and - most importantly - the organization must adapt to what they offer, rather than the other way around. It's all too easy for decision-makers to be swayed by offerings that sound good in the sales pitch, but don't provide the best outcomes in the long run.

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Attilio Di Battista, Sam Grayling, Elselot Hasselaar, Till Leopold, Ricky Li, Mark Rayner, and Saadia Zahidi, World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2023, World Economic Forum, May 2023: https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF. Future_of Jobs 2023.pdf

If the history of L&D has taught us anything, it's that this function is most effective when it acts as a strategic partner with a comprehensive approach and as an enabler of long-term value. The L&D environment can be difficult to navigate; if decision-makers aren't grounded in strong learning principles, they can be swayed by approaches and technologies that don't provide best outcomes for the organization as a whole. That's why the five key factors of organizational learning are so important. They establish practices grounded in a solid understanding of what the organization needs and how to deliver it. When these factors are in place, they do more to generate true value than all the time in the world.

1. Strategic alignment

Even when Chief Learning Officers (CLOs) and L&D professionals gain a "seat at the table" with fellow executives, they often remain separate from the organizational strategy where their role matters most - at the line and functional levels. This lack of alignment often shows up as a disconnect between learning and doing. Business unit leaders might implement a new program - a new menu choice at a restaurant chain, or a robotic maintenance feature at a factory. They come to the CLO three weeks before the start date to place a training order. As a result, the L&D design is rushed, the implementation is inconsistent, and the results are frustrating.

The alternative is an ongoing operating model for strategic alignment. The business unit or function invites someone from L&D to be present during its regular strategic planning process. The learning experts are in the flow, interviewing people in the workforce, developing a much deeper understanding of employee needs. They can help identify the skills that underpin the desired transformation, and the gaps where other skills are needed. They may proactively notice areas of growth that require new skill- development resources and start setting them up.

In one instance, a global management consulting firm's CLO leads all learning and talent development projects, in partnership with line managers and HR professionals. These cross-functional partnerships ensure that L&D has a deep knowledge of business needs. It makes better use of the in-depth learner knowledge from groups like HR and talent and aligns projects with goals that further the business strategy.

Another organization, which conducts pharmaceutical research and development, uses KPIs to manage strategic alignment. The L&D leaders mapped correlations between learning and profitability. They also mapped skills to job objectives, so they can identify specific employees who need learning opportunities.

Effective communication is another critical aspect of strategic alignment. L&D may face challenges in overcoming outdated perceptions, particularly when it comes to digital learning- which many organizations associate with compliance training. Employees need to hear explicitly how a particular training or development option will help their team's purpose, role, or function - and how that will reverberate with corporate strategy and their own careers. Endorsements from relevant leaders, such as the head of sales for a sales training program or talent leaders for a management program, can significantly enhance the impact of learning initiatives.

In one professional services firm, the CLO created a development framework for the entire organization. It emphasized that learning was embedded throughout every aspect of daily work. This framework became the shared language of development planning, talent reviews, and leadership communication. Each function was held accountable for delivering against the framework in its own way. Throughout everything, L&D ensured that the whole enterprise moved together to create the conditions for development.

2. Relevance to the individual

Al learning efforts should create capabilities that transfer directly to the job. A new upskilling campaign might find initial success because of visible CEO sponsorship and efforts to motivate people. However, it will not take hold permanently unless employees can see results. Specifically, they need to see how those new skills will benefit them in their work.

The initiative must meet people halfway. It must challenge people enough to motivate them, but not so much that they are frustrated. They must help people overcome the inertia of previous post-program "vanity" metrics, which may have scored people high even if they couldn't demonstrate the needed skills.

In demonstrating relevance, L&D leaders must use a carrot and stick approach. On one hand, these new skills are intrinsically rewarding. There is power and joy in learning them. On the other hand, there is no choice. The world is changing, and the organization is under new stress. If employees' jobs are at risk unless they learn the new skills, they need to hear it directly.

One global convenience store chain with more than 120,000 employees accomplished all this. The top leaders understood that employee leadership in the stores was a major contributor to commercial and operational success. The L&D function conducted more than 60 interviews and a quantitative survey to identify the critical skills that the stores needed to thrive. The resulting leadership training simulation was rolled out to store managers, who found it keenly relevant. Internal champions at the corporate level followed up, supporting the implementation of optimal behaviors. The success of this leadership training was immediately apparent in decreased attrition and improved customer satisfaction.

3. Quality of instructional experience

The L&D profession has gained a great deal of insight into learning quality during the past 60 years. It can draw on a rich, varied body of research and practice. Developmental project staffing, performance support, coaching, internal mobility, apprenticeship, and digital learning have all been studied and prototyped.

The research and neuroscience have made it clear. People retain about 5% of what they hear in lectures and talks. They learn much more from teaching others, and still more from action: working on teams that explicitly put their new skills into play. Employees learn the most when they can act, reflect, redesign, and practice what they do.

To deliver initiatives with requisite quality, L&D professionals must be familiar with this research and know how to design their offerings accordingly. They and their audience must also have the motivation for this form of learning experience. Their internal client decision-makers must recognize the value of evidence-based experiential learning in the real world.

A professional services firm learned the value of learning quality the hard way. It built its own internal university: a classroom learning center capable of training 50,000 professionals in a year. The L&D group had trouble getting people to attend in person. When they did, the learners could not practice their skills as they would on the job at home.

The firm completely overhauled its learning strategy. Instead of faraway sessions, it offered three successive hours of team-based learning, led by local leaders. Graduates could then choose from more than 300 digital learning assets that popped up in the flow of work, and were continuously modified or replaced based on data, with new assets appearing regularly. None were more than 45 seconds long. They included videos, interactive media, voice memos, and library links, and many other modalities.

The professionals loved it; the material was succinct and available when it was needed most. Time out of market was greatly reduced. The L&D team could directly measure the impact on error and quality rates.

In a similar situation, a national healthcare provider turned to role-based simulation training to support a complete systems transformation. The organization's personnel needed to operate at faster speeds and be more responsive to patient needs. Instead of sitting in courses, employees took part in virtual-reality simulations on subjects like efficiency, coaching others, and managing privacy with medical data. In these simulations, their choices led to realistic consequences. The simulations were offered in several languages and tailored to varying cultural attitudes. This innovative method took the place of 50,000 hours of frontline managers' time per year, and it gave people the requisite capabilities. It also provided more visibility into the skill levels of people in different parts of the organization.

4. Long-term continuity

Enterprises with high-value skill development have created a cultural expectation for continuous learning. They recognize that people build capabilities throughout their careers, and that companies which encourage this reap rewards in reduced turnover and greater overall employee commitment.

Continuous learning requires its own form of instructional design. Instead of concentrating design in a few days or weeks, it takes place over years, embedded in teams, apprenticeships, and experiences. It combines in-person mentorship, digital courses, and on-the-job learning. It adapts its designs to different populations, and continually monitors their interests and capabilities.

Some organizations are prescriptive about continuous learning. They embed learning requirements in performance evaluations, ask senior leaders to role model learning, and use internal campaigns to communicate the rules. One multinational pharmaceutical corporation sets an aspirational standard of 100 hours of learning per year. A Fortune 500 technology consultancy asks all employees to commit 40 hours of learning time per year and makes learning a mandatory part of promotion eligibility. A global management consulting firm makes learning KPIs a part of the performance dialogue with every business unit leader. These structured accountability mechanisms send strong signals about the value.

Other companies have chosen a less prescriptive approach. A software company offers employees dedicated, discretionary tuition budgets they can use for learning opportunities. A global management consulting firm provides client-facing employees with charge codes for learning time. It also includes learning in its leadership growth plan, which employees write annually. They map out career aspirations and request opportunities for apprenticeships or on-the-job experience.

In all successful cases, there is a high level of transparency among individuals, staffing teams, and managers about what an employee needs to do to be successful. Some organizations also include other supports: individual and group coaching, tuition for outside courses, and after-action review dialogues in which teams consider the outcomes of a project and how they might operate differently next time.

5. Breadth of opportunity

Every employee will experience some level of disruption in the coming years and democratized development access is critical to ensuring the value of L&D. Access must be available, varied, and open to all - not just to high performers or knowledge workers, and not limited to special occasions. In our research, we discovered underserved populations within almost every organization.

Front-line workforces, where employees are typically paid by the hour or on contract, represent the greatest challenge- and opportunity. In financial, retail, and online businesses, along with government agencies, these are the people who meet customers and citizens. In manufacturing, their engagement can represent millions of dollars in productivity and savings. The organization's standing and reputation depends on its front-line skills and capabilities.

These employees are typically ignored by L&D initiatives. A recent McKinsey study found that 70 percent of front-line workers have applied to career advancement opportunities, but they simply are not getting the right resources or support to advance their careers." They have a high need for training for that reason, and because automated systems and other technological advances are poised to disrupt their work. Current market signals suggest these populations may experience even more inequitable access to L&D in the future.

Yet there are positive examples of major companies that have built their leading positions through L&D initiatives for all their people. One major consumer-packaged goods company uses internal learning as a talent pipeline. It has identified difficult-to- fill roles such as delivery drivers, maintenance mechanics, and data analysts, and set up internal mechanisms that reveal untapped talent pools. During the pandemic, this company rolled out in-depth learning programs to more than 100,000 U.S. employees.

The programs included tuition assistance, an academy for high-demand skills, certifications for skill validation, a talent marketplace for visibility into open roles and projects, and a technology platform that aligns employee skills with job opportunities.

The curriculum includes about 11,000 digital and in-person learning assets, most available on demand. It offers content tailored for employees who are already in technical roles and want to keep learning, as well as other courses and programs built for those who are not in technical roles, but regularly use digital tools in their work. The programs range from short how-to videos to in-depth boot camps in areas like data analytics, cloud computing, and business intelligence. People who thought they were stuck as administrative assistants or line operators are now becoming sales analysts and software engineers. The results are deeply valuable to the organization, precisely because it taps the engagement of all its people. Attributable indicators include lowered attrition rates and high promotion rates, and non-attributable indicators include a marked, wide uplift in the company's culture.

Other companies have achieved similar goals, with less comprehensive programs that still increase range of opportunity. A European pharmaceutical company instills learning into each product launch, making sure front-line employees learn the details of products, role-play important dialogues, and receiving feedback to refine their sales approaches. Another pharma company hosts an annual dedicated week of learning for all employees, including team exercises. An airline created an action-learning experiential system for its front-line employees, embedded in the work environment. In less than a year, 3,000 front-line managers were upskilled with practice, immediate feedback, and peer coaching, spending only 3 days away from their teams.

Where do we go from here?

These 5 factors - strategic alignment, relevance to the individual, quality of instructional design, long-term continuity, and breadth of opportunity - are well-recognized as foundational for gaining value. Nonetheless, many L&D functions ignore them. Instead, they experiment with shiny, new technology in isolation of busi ness strategy. They default to "telling" strategies with subject-matter experts. To be perceived as responsive, they sign on to the faddish recommendations of influential leaders or vendors.

To prioritize value, we need to start changing attitudes and behavior. In the L&D function, that requires three basic changes:

1. Investigate what the organization and its people need. Invest real time in understanding the strategic goals and gaps in learning. Cultivate relationships with business unit leaders, learner communities, and HR experts to get a better perspective.

2. Create an experiment inextricably linked to strategic needs. Find a specific outcomes-based goal with a tangible, measurable target (other than engagement time). For example, you might create a project to fill high-demand technical roles

   with internal people who gained their skills from the L&D effort.

3. Improve the methods of impact measurement. Today's organizations possess rich

   data landscapes, with details on work, performance, career path and progression, and employee attitudes. Work with analytics experts to interpret the data and

   design accordingly.

People and organizations make time for what they value. L&D won't find a footing by advocating for more time. We must frame our work by clarifying the outcomes we are trying to achieve. These might include developing hidden talent pools, boosting retention, building employee resilience in uncertain markets, or sparking innovation in key business units. Time is an enabler. It isn't the goal.

It takes courage to shift from time to value as an objective. Unless L&D makes this shift first, no one else will. As we practice the shift, we'll find that it gets easier. Our own capabilities increase. The courage is rewarded with credibility. Most importantly, the people of the organization finally develop the skills they needed all along - enough to make the most of the time they spend working.

About the Authors

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all the authors and thought partners for their invaluable contributions to this article. Their combined expertise and insights have been instrumental in shaping the content, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of the benefits of adopting a skills accelerator approach and transforming the L&D function to deliver real-world capabilities.

The Learning Forum + CLO LIFT Leaders

Brian Hackett, Founder and CEO of The Learning Forum

Meighan Hackett Poritz, Co-founder and Managing Director, The Learning Forum

Noah G. Rabinowitz, CLO LIFT Leader and Candidate for CLO/Chief Talent Officer

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The Clo Lift 'skills Accelerator' June 3, 2024

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Transforming the L&D function to deliver real-world capabilities

Not long ago, a major professional services firm launched a new artificial intelligence consulting practice with a target of reaching $100 million in revenue in multiple years. They asked the Chief Learning Officer (CLO) to build the capacity to train hundreds o professionals per quarter in AI, blockchain, robotics, and other advanced technologies. The new program would have to train both existing staff and new recruits, to scale up or down as needed, and to evolve as skills changed.

Ten years earlier, this program would have used conventional classroom-based courses, each taking months to design. Now, the field is changing too quickly. Moreover, the firm's learning and development (L&D leaders knew that formal learning would not suffice. Their own data, along with outside research, had consistently found that people retain a very small amount of what they hear in lectures and talks. They learn much more from teaching others, and still more from action: working on teams that explicitly use their new skills in real work. People learn the most when they can act, practice, and reflect on what they do.

Thus, the CLO, with top leadership approval, created an entirely new broad-based skills accelerator for advanced technologies. It was set up to integrate with day-to-day work and keep up with the pace of client demand, based on staffing data rather than estimates. (Business leaders sometimes overestimated how many people they would need.) The 3-month program minimized classroom learning, replacing it with self-assessed online exercises, "bootcamp"-style intensives and apprenticeships with the firm's tech experts. The firm used the training results explicitly to assign staff to real-world projects, treating them as opportunities for further learning, and tracking revenue impact.

Overall, the company became more agile and responsive to technology changes. There were bottom-line benefits as well. Moreover, at a time rampant with tech layoffs, staff members felt more confident about keeping their jobs.

The skills accelerator concept represents a reframing of L&D's potential. It can have a significant impact on an organization's capabilities, on an accelerated timeline. The more intensive and well-designed the effort, the more proficient the company becomes. This makes it more capable of generating revenue, allowing more investment of time and resources in successive cycles. This virtuous cycle enables the organization's skills to surge forward at a pace that is equal to or faster than the demands of the business and markets.

A skills accelerator has momentum, but it does not run by itself. Its practices can seem unfamiliar and even counterintuitive to many. Someone, typically the CLO, must design it and keep it moving, integrating that effort with the rest of the organization's processes and its growth.

The pressure for proficiency

There is always a need for workforce upskilling and reskilling. Now, however, that need has intensified. With almost a quarter of jobs in the US expected to change by 2027, and the pace of change increasing, upgrading skills hasbecome a strategic imperative for companies and employees.

The primary cause is the speed and scale of technological change: computing power, bandwidth, artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, and more. Organizations need to rapidly upskill and reskill individuals for jobs that did not exist just a few years ago- like GenAI auditor or robotics upgrade coordinator - where sufficient skills levels do not widely exist in the talent marketplace. Individuals need to rapidly upskill if they want to acquire new knowledge, skill, and ability to advance to the next opportunity.

Meanwhile, the supply of labor is dwindling and moving to emerging economies. In the industrialized world, populations continue to age, birth rates continue to decline and the overall level of education has plateaued. Organizations are thus competing for a larger share of a constrained talent pool. In the US alone, 20% of Americans are expected to hit retirement age by 2030 vs.16.8% today. Businesses need to reskill the pie rather than expect the skilled population to grow organically. The World Economic Forum estimates that between 1 and 3 billion people will need extensive skill development by 2030.

Employee preferences have also changed. There are increased demands for new working models, such as remote working and flexible hours. Non-traditional work structures - temporary, gig, and part-time jobs - are more prevalent. Workers seek the alignment of work, values, and purpose. They want organizations to provide them with compelling opportunities and environments that they find rewarding, challenging and valuable. This invariably means enabling them to keep learning new skills.

Finally, the tools for learning are undergoing dramatic change. Suppose, for example, that mid-level managers need to learn better protocols for holding staff meetings. They can now turn to GenAl tools, explain their current difficulties, and receive suggestions for interventions on the spot, with unlimited opportunities to test their skills in simulations and return for further guidance. Though it comes from a bot, this kind of skill-building can do more to change behavior over time than a four-hour course on holding difficult conversations.

Many top executives are aware of these issues. They respond by demanding that their L&D departments move faster to develop the skills - in fields like Al, biotech, blockchain and robotics - that are needed right now in the marketplace. If L&D can't develop those capabilities in-house, then the company must recruit them, which can be much more expensive and less effective.

Aaron de Smet, et al, "What is the Future of Work?", McKinsey, January 23, 2023: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey- explainers/what-is-the-future-of-work

The L&D function does not always keep pace with those demands. CLOs may be unduly influenced by the business leaders with the loudest voices or distracted by "flavor-of- the-month" technologies and practices that seem appealing at first glance, but don't live up to their promises. Another distraction can be focusing on long-term strategic enablers: creating a comprehensive skills taxonomy, a lofty plan, or a full-scale internal marketplace. Many organizations need these, but not at the expense of the short-term skills that are critical for today's business priorities. The more urgent L&D challenge is to surge the most-needed skills and learn to move with simplicity and speed.

"Your success in life isn't based on your ability to simply change," says business writer Mark Sanborn. "It is based on your ability to change faster than your competition, customers, and business." This aphorism applies to the company, the individuals working there, and the L&D function itself. Resources are limited and the need is urgent; CLOs must focus attention on the few highest priority demands and raise their game in those areas.

CLOs must ask: Is our work building lasting, relevant skills right now? Are we delivering business impact? Is the work building or diminishing L&Ds effectiveness and credibility? If the answers to any of these questions is no, then perhaps it is time for a skills accelerator approach. Though the details may vary from one organization to the next, there are always three basic considerations:

• Pace: Move from reactive to proactive offerings, recognizing the increasing importance of speed in delivery;

• Relevance: Move from marginal to mission-critical skills, enabling the skills accelerator to drive immediate business impact;

• Scope: Move from silos to scope, breaking down the traditional organizational boundaries to cultivate skill utilization across the entire enterprise.

Pace

The need for speed is fundamentally changing the L&D paradigm. Just a few years ago, recruiters for the function placed a high value on traditional instructional design skills. Today, an L&D candidate needs strong analytics capabilities and, ideally some GenAl experience. The days of taking 12 months to design and develop a learning curriculum are long gone. Those who don't speed up will be viewed as a cost center and shunted to the side.

Budgeting for L&D organizations, which is typically decided annually, can no longer keep up. Nor can the existing skill-based infrastructure: the digital platforms, courseware, and organizational structures. All of this must be changed instantly, with the agility usually associated with software launches.

Some speed will come from using tools like Generative A.l. The L&D function is now capable of building precision training and guidance systems at an unprecedented speed. This will allow customized training that will help people upskill and reskill more successfully. It must be carefully managed (for example, for misinformation and deepfakes, as well as the protection of copyrighted material), but the speed of creation is nonetheless much faster.

Simulations are also much easier to build at speed. A"virtual twin," which allows people to test their decisions in advance, formerly took weeks to design and develop. Now a GenAl system can create one in a few hours with a succession of prompts. Similar systems can build learning assessments that test people on their usable knowledge from a document of content. Integrated platforms can coordinate all the activity so that GenAl learning systems naturally reflect changes in the technology and build on prerequisites that came before.

Moving at speed goes beyond the technology. There must be clear lines of communication and accountability, with direct input from the business leaders.

Relevance

A technology company had a partnership with Apple and decided to upskill their organization to gain more proficiency in selected mobile phone applications.

Unfortunately, these skills had little or no relation to the company's priorities. Six months after the training, more than half of the people who went through it said they never used the skills. Other than good relations with another company, there was no measurable return on the investment made.

Most companies cannot afford this type of project anymore, because of the opportunity cost. They need every bit of L&D resource to realize their business priorities - which depend on employees gaining real skills, instead of just credentials, and using them on the job. They need to gain relevance.

Being relevant can be as simple as checking in regularly with management, and being included in strategic sessions where the workforce skills are needed. It doesn't require a complex skills taxonomy, or a process for cascading training down through the organization. A CLO who listens to the organization and understands what it's trying to accomplish in the marketplace can volunteer suggestions: "Here are our greatest gaps. Here is where I can help create a talent supply for them. Here's what we need to get it done."

As you adjust your offerings, take a talent lifecycle view. Work in an agile, collaborative manner with talent and business leaders to identify the organization's long-term needs. Consider a wider range of skills and how to develop them: buy, build, or borrow?

Divide the function's work into three types of content:

• Table stakes: These are the traditional elements, such as compliance-based training or operational basics. Frame this as a stable set of core learning offerings which do not need continual reinvention. Deliver them at a lower cost, so you have time, money and attention left to develop your ability to surge. Some of this may become guidance for particular situations, implemented with GenAl, used at the moment people need them to conduct a maintenance operation or write a particular type of document.

• Fundamentals: These are the enduring human capabilities that matter. They set people up for success, and yet they have not necessarily been learned in business school - or any school. They include cognitive capabilities such as complex problem solving, creative thinking, and analytic logic, plus the skills of human-to-human communication and emotional intelligence: team management, mentoring and coaching, and conflict resolution. These offerings are tailored to reflect your organization's needs for higher-quality management and leadership. They may evolve as your organization develops.

• Surge: These are the critical skills needed for greatest business impact. Some of them are specific to particular technologies or practices: GenAl, robotics, biotech, or others. They are urgently needed now, but they may not have much longevity. Most skills learned 10 years ago are obsolete, and the half-life of a skill learned today could be as little as 5 years. Therefore, embrace adaptive design. Create programs that change rapidly, and that can be adapted to the specific skill levels of individuals and needs of the organization. Tailor learning pathways to people in specific functions like sales, customer service, user interface design, procurement, or R&D.

A skills accelerator invests most heavily in the surge and fundamentals, continually adapting them to a closer fit with the organization's priorities. This includes follow-up. When a company trains people to use a new robotics technology, it needs to change the staffing and evaluation systems accordingly, so they set people up to use these new skills back in the plant. Otherwise, they'll revert to their old ways. Viable follow-up methods include group discussions at the workplace, hourly pay incentives for using the new approach, and involving the individuals in suggesting adjustments to the system. It can also include certificates and badges to post on LinkedIn, but these tend to be appreciated most when people recognize the certification as relevant to their jobs or their own goals.

Scope

Any critical skill-building effort must clear the hurdle of scope: Reaching beyond a few business units to the whole of the organization. Broader scope requires changes in organizational infrastructure. The whole business -including HR, IT, operations, and governance - must be in sync with the skills accelerator.

Establish rules and investment so that L&D will be able to surge as needed, without delays in approval. Deploy changes in elements such as governance models, funding, incentives, role expectations, compensation, credentials, review criteria, and hiring criteria.

For example, your current compensation structures may set pay based on role and tenure. Change them to reflect employees' skill levels. Organizational rules may discourage individuals from practicing their new skills - either in their jobs or in their external lives. Revise them to encourage learning. The corporate culture may inhibit upskilling - so that when people return from a learning program, the manager ignores their new abilities. Educate managers and employees on the value of these new capabilities, ideally by showing them results. It may be cumbersome now to identify training and apply for new roles where the skills are needed. Install an internal digital platform for helping people do this.

The elements of a skills infrastructure are often designed separately from each other. Each has its own legacy - in L&D, HR, procurement, and IT. To build an organization's competence, they need to be integrated into a whole.

The leadership of one pharmaceutical company learned this the hard way. They agreed that the marketing group needed to be more data-driven and approved a learning program for proficiency with analytic tools. However, few marketers signed up. They simply didn't see the value in gaining these skills. Only when the performance management process changed to include data proficiency did the marketing organization pivot.

As you develop scope, continue to collect and analyze data about outcomes, including employee performance, roles, accomplishments, learning, and career paths. Use this data to help you continually revise and improve the offerings.

One professional services firm conducted knowledge assessments of its scaled-up L&D programs, expecting to find a great difference between its basic courses and its advanced learning on the same technical subjects. Instead, they found little difference in actual performance. The outcomes improved only when people began using the skills on the job. This insight changed the conversations -- from "We need more learning courses," to "We need to give our graduates more experience in the field."

Transforming the L&D Function

The skills accelerator concept represents a new operating model for L&D professionals. If they cannot adapt, they risk falling behind other organizations.

CLOs can get started with a series of local moves:

• Look closely at the link between the business strategy and the necessary skills. Gain a deep understanding of how its work is conducted and how its tasks are changing. Consider how technology is impacting the organization and what skills will be required soon.

• Place the employee at the center. Design with the learner's motivation, engagement, and career benefit in mind.

• Identify critical performance gaps. Don't get stuck trying to define them all. Pick just one to focus on.

• Define a plan for that first performance gap. Work with business leaders across the organization to create a roadmap for building the skill supply in that area.

• Ensure foundational data elements are in place. Look for KPIs and other data related to performance, for use in demonstrating progress, sensing trends, and defining gaps in a manner meaningful to the business.

• Bring the learning effort into the flow of work. Develop managers' coaching and teaching capabilities. Encourage first line leaders, for instance, to assign their staff to tasks that make use of the skills they've learned. Demonstrate the power of experimentation and reflection on the job. Train managers to ask their direct reports regularly: "What have you learned this week? How can you use it next week?" Subtle changes of that kind can rapidly raise upskilling impact.

• Pay close attention to the results. Track the outcomes of this effort, and how they have affected revenues and capabilities. Create a narrative that demonstrates what

  worked and redesign your efforts to learn from what didn't work.

As L&D professionals, our role is evolving. With approaches like the responsive skills accelerator, we foster a culture that supports and empowers L&D.

A responsive skills accelerator can revitalize a company. For example, when a telecommunications company made customer focus a key priority, the L&D function became a catalyst for change. It worked closely with business leaders, internal communications teams, and the talent acquisition function. Top management ensured that time was dedicated to learning. Other priorities were paused to focus on building skills. Leaders themselves participated, modeling the importance of the new capability for everyone. There were new KPIs and hiring criteria. The entire culture shifted.

This whole approach is also transformative for the individuals it engages - sometimes at a massive scale. A professional services firm in India sought to recruit staff for coding and other baseline technology work. There was not enough available talent in India with the requisite tech degrees, and the costs for hiring degreed people were prohibitive, so the firm's L&D function looked for another way to fill the gap. It offered an online test to find people who could be trained.

Thousands of people were selected based on their test results and assigned to one of 300 different upskilling paths. After an 8-week intensive program designed for each path, the graduates were given real-world assignments. They performed better at these jobs, on average, than college graduates with computer science degrees. In addition to dramatically improving the firm's margins, this program changed the lives of the recruits, who suddenly leapfrogged into a high-earning profession.

Changes like this are often regarded as rare: worthy of celebration because they happen so infrequently. With a skills accelerator in place, they happen all the time. This is simply how the L&D function operates. The business needs and value are a core part of its operating model. It routinely creates and implements strategic approaches for improving performance and overall effectiveness, and changes peoples' lives for the better. By investing in the skills accelerator approach, the L&D function can gain the pace, relevance, and scope that it has needed all along.

About the Authors

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all the authors and thought partners for their invaluable contributions to this article. Their combined expertise and insights have been instrumental in shaping the content, providing readers with a comprehensive understanding of the benefits of adopting a skills accelerator approach and transforming the L&D function to deliver real-world capabilities.

The Learning Forum + CLO LIFT Leaders

Brian Hackett, Founder and CEO of The Learning Forum

Meighan Hackett Poritz, Co-founder and Managing Director, The Learning Forum

Noah G. Rabinowitz, CLO LIFT Leader and Candidate for CLO/Chief Talent Officer

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CLOs from 17 major organizations, in collaboration with our ecosystem partners, are generating thought leadership and shaping innovative perspectives. This narrative delves into the ramifications for the future of Learning and Development (L&D) and highlights the operational shifts necessary to remain pertinent.

Join us on a path where collaboration and genuine connections pave the way for leadership excellence.

CLO LIFT Prologue // What is CLO LIFT and Why Does It Matter? (download pdf) 

• Governance of Learning - the need to effectively govern learning, ensuring alignment with organizational goals, resource optimization,  and the scalability of a coherent learner experience.

• Surging Skills - Upskilling needs to move at a speed equal to or greater than the pace of the business and markets.  This requires the ability to surge a skill as it becomes strategically critical, making a material difference in compressed time periods.

• Return on Time Invested - the need for a systematic approach to demonstrate value for the time investment into upskilling and to align learning initiatives with business objectives.

What Is Clo Lift And Why Does It Matter?

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The Learning Forum’s CLO LIFT: A Practitioner-driven Effort to Strengthen the Field of Learning & Development

Learning and Development does not suffer from a shortage of tools, platforms, frameworks, or commentary. If anything, it suffers from the opposite. The field is saturated with solutions, yet many of its central problems remain perpetually unresolved. Organizations continue to invest heavily in learning while expressing limited confidence in its impact. They continue to expand content libraries while remaining uncertain that employees are learning what matters most. They continue to adopt new technologies and trends without a sufficiently clear standard for determining what effective practice actually looks like.

The CLO LIFT initiative grew out of this context and discussions within The Learning Forum’s CLO Council — a confidential, high-trust network for cross-industry collaboration — where a recurring frustration had become difficult to ignore: despite years of innovation, many of the field's foundational problems remain stubbornly resistant to improvement.

Why a New Effort is Needed

The central claim behind CLO LIFT is quite straightforward: many of the most important problems in L&D are not isolated implementation failures. They are structural problems embedded in how the function defines success, organizes its work, allocates attention, and evaluates value.

This distinction is significant. If these challenges were simply tactical, they would have been resolved by now through improved platforms, enhanced content design, or superior vendor solutions. Despite decades - over fifty years - of innovation and progress, the anticipated cumulative benefits have often failed to materialize. Instead, what remains are more fundamental questions:

• How does learning secure time and credibility within organizations where every activity vies for limited attention?

• How can skills development keep pace with business change rather than lag behind it?

• What forms of governance help L&D align with strategy, accountability, and measurable outcomes?

• What should count as meaningful evidence of learning impact? What defines a learning culture or a culture of performance? How do people learn and perform at their best?

These are not peripheral questions. They go directly to the legitimacy and strategic utility of the L&D function.

The Purpose of CLO LIFT

CLO LIFT was formed to create a serious practitioner space for addressing these enduring issues collectively rather than episodically or on an artificial trend cycle. Its purpose is not to promote a product, amplify a trend, or add another layer of commentary to an already crowded field. Its purpose is to generate clearer thinking, stronger shared language, and more usable standards for practice. The initiative is explicitly practitioner-driven and non-commercial, with an emphasis on problems that persist across technologies, industries, and management fashions.

In practical terms, this means four specific things.

1. First, it means defining persistent problems with greater clarity and less reliance on fashionable language.
   

2. Second, it means developing a more explicit and shared standard for what “good” looks like in learning and leadership development.
   

3. Third, it means creating practical tools, frameworks, and articles that can improve real work inside organizations.

4. Fourth, it means shifting thought leadership back toward those accountable for results, rather than leaving it primarily in the hands of vendors, thought leaders, analysts, and external commentators.

A Distinctive Operating Stance

What makes CLO LIFT potentially valuable is not just the topics it addresses, but the stance it takes toward them.

It is deliberately practitioner-driven rather than vendor-led. It has no commercial product attached to it. It acknowledges organizational constraints rather than pretending they can be designed away. And it aims to be constructive rather than merely critical. In other words, it begins from the assumption that serious progress in L&D requires intellectual honesty, operational realism, and shared standards that can survive contact with actual organizational life.

That stance is important because too much discourse in the field alternates between hype and cynicism. One side overstates what new solutions can do. The other side settles for critique without building anything durable in response. A serious profession needs a third path: disciplined, evidence-oriented, practitioner-built improvement.

Core Problem Areas

From the start, CLO LIFT has focused on a set of challenge areas identified by senior practitioners. These include time to learn, skills acceleration, governance, driving a performance culture, the science of learning to learn, the evolving mandate of the CLO, and outcomes-based measurement. The significance of these topics is not simply that they are timely. It is that they represent recurring constraints on L&D effectiveness that have remained unresolved despite repeated waves of innovation.

Consider just one example: measurement. The field has spent years discussing learning metrics, yet many organizations still rely heavily on activity counts, completion data, and sentiment signals that offer only weak evidence of actual capability change. A more rigorous field requires stronger distinctions between participation, satisfaction, learning, transfer, performance improvement, and business contribution. CLO LIFT is intended to create space for those types of distinctions and to make them operational.

The same logic applies to governance. Governance is often treated as an administrative concern, but in reality, it is a strategic one. How L&D is structured, who owns decisions, how its funded, how priorities are set, and how accountability is distributed all shape whether learning can function as a genuine business lever or merely as a support activity. The original CLO LIFT thought piece, “Unleashing The Power of L&D Through Governance,” identifies governance as a strategic enabler for precisely this reason.

The Challenges CLO LIFT is Addressing

The Learning Forum’s CLO LIFT initiative began by crowdsourcing challenge areas from senior leaders, prioritizing problems that persist regardless of technology or fashion, co-creating articles, papers, and tools rooted in lived experience, and hosting working sessions where peers can pressure-test ideas with real stakes attached. That matters because it signals an important methodological commitment. CLO LIFT is not positioning itself as a source of abstract doctrine. It is positioning itself as a working forum in which experienced leaders refine ideas through practice, disagreement, failure, and iteration. That is a healthier model for field-building than thought leadership based primarily on novelty or visibility.

We are addressing the following challenges as practitioners and peers. Please reach out to learn about the many opportunities to engage with practitioners and our partners! Contact Us

Work Completed to Date

We are addressing the following challenges as practitioners and peers. Please reach out to learn about the many opportunities to engage with practitioners and our partners! Contact Us

• What is CLO LIFT and Why Does It Matter?

• The Skills Accelerator - Upskilling needs to move at a pace equal to or greater than the business and market pace. This requires the ability to surge a skill as it becomes strategically critical, making a material difference in compressed time periods.

• From Time to Value: Reframing the challenge of organizational learning—the need for a systematic approach to demonstrating value for the time invested in upskilling and aligning learning initiatives with business objectives.

• Unleashing The Power of L&D Through Governance: Governance as a Strategic Enabler - the need to effectively govern learning, ensuring alignment with organizational goals, resource optimization, and the scalability of a coherent learner experience.
  

• The Evolving Role of the CLO and the Future of the L&D: The “Role of the Chief Learning Officer” project is dedicated to defining and exploring the evolving responsibilities and impact of the Chief Learning Officer (CLO) within modern organizations. Recognizing the growing importance of continuous learning and development in maintaining a competitive advantage, this initiative examines the strategic role of the CLO in fostering a culture of learning, driving talent development, and aligning learning initiatives with business objectives. The project delves into the challenges CLOs face, including integrating new technologies, measuring the ROI of learning programs, and ensuring learning strategies meet the diverse needs of the workforce.

  • The Strategic Role of CLOs and CHROs in the Age of AI

  • The future of the CLO: Leading in a world of merged work and learning

• The Science of Learning How to Learn: The “The Science of Learning How to Learn” project is dedicated to defining the complex problem area surrounding the meta-skill of learning. Recognizing that traditional education often overlooks the strategies and cognitive processes underlying effective learning, this initiative explores the multifaceted nature of learning itself. It examines barriers to efficient learning, including fixed mindsets, a lack of metacognitive awareness, and ineffective study habits. By investigating these challenges through interdisciplinary research in neuroscience, psychology, and education, the project seeks to identify the key components and underlying mechanisms that contribute to successful learning. Ultimately, this project aims to articulate a clear understanding of the obstacles and enablers in the learning process, laying the groundwork for developing targeted interventions and resources to help individuals become more adept, self-directed learners.

  • Future of HR Podcast with JP Elliott: How Learning Creates a Competitive Advantage

  • Learning to Learn: The Key Skill in the AI Era

  • CLOLIFT at Harvard: Reflections from the ‘Learning How to Learn’

• Driving a Performance Culture: The “Performance Culture” project is dedicated to defining and addressing the critical issues involved in cultivating a vibrant learning culture within organizations. Recognizing that many companies struggle to embed continuous learning and adaptability into their core values, this initiative investigates the specific challenges of fostering an environment where learning is consistently prioritized and encouraged. It examines barriers such as resistance to change, insufficient leadership support, and a lack of psychological safety for experimentation and growth. The project seeks to identify the key elements and practices that contribute to a thriving learning culture. Ultimately, this project aims to provide a clear roadmap for organizations to overcome these challenges and implement strategies that promote ongoing learning, innovation, and development, thereby enhancing overall organizational performance and employee satisfaction.

The Larger Ambition

CLO LIFT does not assume that one initiative can “fix” Learning and Development. The original set of articles is explicit on that point. Its ambition is more disciplined and, for that reason, more credible: to clarify what good looks like, build usable frameworks, create a setting where practitioners can speak honestly about what failed, and strengthen the professional center of gravity around real practice.

An Invitation to Serious Practitioners

For those who lead learning functions, shape talent strategy, or carry responsibility for development at scale, the invitation here is not to join another conversation for its own sake. It is to participate in the harder work of professionalization: clearer definitions, stronger standards, better measurement, more honest reflection, and more disciplined practice.

That is ultimately what will raise the bar. Not more shiny objects. Not more fashion. Not more inflated claims. Better thinking, built with and by the people who actually have to make the work hold up.

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(2023, October 25). Skills Intelligence Will Change HR. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent- acquisition/Skills-intelligence-will-change-hr

The $8.5 Trillion Talent Shortage. Korn Ferry. https://www.kornferry.com/insights/this-week-in-leadership/talent- crunch-future-of-work

(2023, April 30). The Future of Jobs Report 2023. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.orgLpublications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2023/digest/

(2023, May 1). Future ofjobs 2023: These are the most in-demand skills now- and beyond. World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/05/future-of-jobs-2023-skills/

Del Gatto, S. .J (2009). Creating Balance in a World of Stress: Six Key Habits to Avoid in Order toReduce Stress. Universe.

[Rush]. (1980). Rush- Freewill- Universal Music Group (Audio)

Zapp, Mike (2017) - The World Bank and Education, International Journal of Educational Development

(2020, November 17). Three Steps to Turn Your Company into a Learning Powerhouse. BCG. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/turn-your-company-into-a-learning-powerhouse

Van Dam, Nick (2018). Elevating Learning &Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field. McKinsey &

Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/elevating- learning-and-development-insights-and-practical-guidance-from-the-field

Waytz, A. (2023, March30). Beware a Culture of Busyness: Organizations must stop conflating activity with achievement. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2023/03/beware-a-culture-of-busyness

Ma, .L (2022, July 11). The Internal Chaos of Chronically Busy People. Psychology Today.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychoanalysis-unplugged/202207/the-internal-chaos-chronically-busy- people

Gratton, .L (2023, June 26). It's Time to Face the Three Challenges of Learning. MIT Sloan. https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/its-time-to-face-the-three-challenges-of-learning/

Kelly, A. (2006). "Too busy to think, too tired to learn" - the attrition of the apprenticeshipm o d e l of surgical training in the United Kingdom.

Scheerens, J. (2014). Effectiveness of time investments in education: insights from a review and meta-analysis.

Van Dam, Nick (2018). Elevating Learning &Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field. McKinsey &

Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/elevating- learning-and-development-insights-and-practical-guidance-from-the-field

Van Dam, Nick. (2018). Elevating Learning &Development: Insights and Practical Guidance from the Field. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/elevating- learning-and-development-insights-and-practical-guidance-from-the-field

(2014, September 1). Lever Six: Organizations &Governance. McKinsey &Company. Retrieved September 1, 2014, from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/lever-six-organization-and-governance

(2021, December 6). Journal of Higher Education Policy Management. Tavlor &Francis Online. Retrieved September 1, 2014, from https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cihe20

(2021, June 22). How do you organize, manage, and govern learningin the flow of work? Deloitte. https://i2a.hcbeta.deloitte.com/insight/153/how-do-you-organize-manage-and-govern-learning-in-the-flow-of-work

(2020, January 13). How Governance Can Help Align L&D with Business Strategy. PIXENTIA. Retrieved January 13, 2020, from https://blog.pixentia.com/how-governance-can-align-Id-with-business-strategy

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