Word Spy - chief learning officer

n. A corporate executive in charge of employee training and education.

Example Citation:

"As the chief learning officer, ask yourself, 'Are we investing sufficiently in learning to generate the growth and return we need?' We had a group of graduate students research the topic, plotting long-term shareholder returns against a number of factors. They discovered that investments in training and development were the single best predictor of shareholder return three to five years down the road."
—Karen Franse, "Build Your Profits," VARBusiness, January 18, 1999

Notes:

The earliest use I found for this phrase is a non-starter because it's really just a bit of word play and not a reference to an actual job title:

"Become more than your company's chief information officer — become its chief learning officer."
—Patricia B. Seybold, "Coping with I-S chaos," Computer Decisions, March 1989

I found another citation from 1991, but it didn't count either because it referred to the job in a fictional context. Here's the first citation that references a real-world job:

"So, just as some companies have a vice-president for total quality or an officer in charge of safety, Argyris explains, the CEO decided to have an executive in charge of organizational learning. He divided the HR function into two sets of tasks: record-keeping tasks and other duties that could be placed in a database, and tasks that involved employee education and retraining. The latter functions were to become the purview of a chief learning officer."
—George F. Kimmerling, "A place at the top for trainers," Training & Development, March, 1993

Category:

Jobs and Job Titles

Posted on November 28, 2001