• has become a strategic, lead player in today’s business organization
• core responsibility is to make sure learning across an entire system is leveraged, not sacrificed
• accountable to the whole system and must have broad discretionary power
• operates by using knowledge about how adults learn, how learning affects work, how value systems operate, how social and technical systems in an enterprise or in their environment may either support or counteract each other

• To facilitate learning and change
• To improve individual, team and organizational effectiveness
• To support business strategies and tactics through research and  experimentation

The CLO position was designed:

• To serve as a strategic resource (representing HRD perspective in the planning process, and ensuring HRD efforts are linked to organization’s strategic goals)
• Represents an expert resource (provides best practices knowledge on learning, and serves as entry point for external consulting expertise)
• Serves as process owner (of processes critical to the organization such as: a) managing internal and external communications; b) overseeing needs analysis, design, testing, delivery and evaluation of performance improvement interventions; c) chartering and equipping business processes redesign teams; d) fostering communities of practice to ensure sharing and transfer of learning in workplace)

• capture, store and retrieve explicit knowledge
• work with the “know-what” of knowledge

CLO…

• works with the “know-how” of knowledge – the tacit knowledge that is hard to codify
• integrates thinking and acting, works involve lots of errors and mistakes, and the interaction with a team in a work context
• helps create  an environment that fosters knowledge sharing informally.

I. Cultural Transformation

• Assisting with the development and communication of a new vision and strategy for the organization and tending to the cultural transformation to support the new corporate direction
• Difficulty of cultural change:  Marsick and Watkins (1994) noted, “Training programs can help deliver skills needed for organizations to change, but do not address the deep-seated, mental models and attitudes or the organizational structures and norms which perpetuate them”.

II. Culture Maintenance

• designed to support the marketplace strategy and address deficiencies in skills essential to maintain the new culture developed

III. Contemporary Initiatives

• Initiatives related to business development, like  developing a new marketing plan, account manager development, or promotional process redesign.
• Requires CLO’s in-depth experience in the industry, comfort/ease in working across all functions of the organization, and a whole systems viewpoint/thinking.

• Due to the nature of work, CLO’s have limited number of quantitative performance indicators, most are budget related.
• CLOs jobs focus mainly on management of projects, preparing plan document for projects including problem or opportunity synopsis, proposed solutions, action steps and timetable, deliverables and projected costs.  Hence, they are evaluated in terms of meeting objectives on target, on time and on budget.