In my previous article, I explored how the Chief Learning Officer (CLO) role has evolved from training leader to business strategist, shaping learning ecosystems that drive measurable growth. As AI disrupts industries and hybrid work reshapes talent needs, CLOs must go beyond training—building agile organizations, closing skills gaps and aligning workforce development with business strategy to ensure long-term success.
But how do you become a CLO? The journey is not linear. All of these functions start and end with the ability to build strategic partnerships. The CLO’s success is directly tied to business leaders’ success. With the Chief People Officer, they align learning initiatives to talent strategy, while a partnership with the Chief Technology Officer also enables scaling through technology. The CLO’s team works closely with people, business partners and functional leaders to address skill gaps and growth opportunities.
Building these kinds of transformative partnerships doesn’t happen overnight. I’ll share the five key steps that shaped my journey to becoming a CLO and the essential partnerships needed at each stage.
5 Steps to Becoming a CLO
1. Leverage Your Education Strategically – Use formal education as a foundation, but focus on business acumen and learning strategy to drive impact.
2. Gain Industry Expertise and Business Insight – Broaden your experience across HR, talent and business functions to understand how learning drives performance.
3. Build High-Impact Partnerships – Collaborate with C-suite leaders to align learning with business priorities, technology and workforce strategy.
4. Drive Leadership Development at Scale – CLOs don’t just develop leaders—they embed leadership into culture, performance, and business growth.
5. Expand and Leverage Your Professional Network – CLO roles are built through visibility, relationships and executive influence.
1. Leverage Your Education Strategically
While there’s no single educational path to becoming a CLO, most have at least a bachelor’s degree in business, psychology, organizational development or education. Successful CLOs also often hold a master’s degree in organizational development, business administration or adult learning. However, practical experience and relationship-building often matter more than specific credentials, especially in our skills-based, relationship-oriented work world.
The value lies in building foundational knowledge that enables strategic partnerships. Business degrees help CLOs understand how to be business partners first, which is crucial for developing effective learning and talent strategies.
Many successful CLOs pursue ongoing education through executive programs or specialized certifications. As a certified executive coach, I leverage tools like the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) for team development and the Leadership Circle 360 for executive assessment. These tools provide entry points into team dynamics while building consistent approaches and language across the organization—a core foundation for building and sustaining a healthy culture.
2. Gain Industry Expertise And Business Insight
The path to CLO typically requires 15+ years of experience, ideally starting in HR business partnership roles. This foundation provides crucial exposure to business operations and builds the strategic mindset essential for learning leadership.
My journey illustrates this diversity of experience. I was coaching the executive team at my first startup when our head of HR stepped down. The CEO handed me the book, “HR for Dummies” and asked me to take on the HR leadership role with his full support. This accelerated learning experience taught me invaluable lessons about growing into new responsibilities even before you are ready, and the importance of continuing to build supportive and strategic partnerships.
I then joined Adobe as an HR business partner, rotating through every business function over three years. This foundation prepared me to build organizational development functions and scale learning at companies like Twitter, WeWork and Udemy. Moving between large enterprises and growth companies also offered different challenges, from navigating complex stakeholder relationships in established organizations to building learning infrastructure from scratch in scaling companies.
Job titles matter less than the scope and impact of your partnerships. Whether called Learning Manager, Talent Development Director or Head of Leadership Development, focus on opportunities that let you partner with senior leaders and influence strategy. Industries can provide helpful context—tech companies require rapid skill development across various roles, while consulting firms might focus more on knowledge management and deeper expertise development. The common thread is building partnerships that connect learning initiatives to business outcomes.
Today’s CLO must also stay ahead of emerging technologies and trends. Beyond formal learning, I’ve found that the most valuable growth comes through active experimentation and practical application. While I’ve taken courses on platforms like Udemy and learned from industry experts like Helen Lee Kupp at Almost Technical to build AI literacy, real learning happens when I experiment with new tools and discuss their implications with my team and other leaders. This hands-on, just in time approach creates powerful learning synergies across the organization.
3. Build High-Impact Partnerships
Success as a CLO depends on building strong relationships across the organization, from the C-suite to frontline managers. These partnerships enable you to drive organizational change, influence without authority, and create a lasting impact on business outcomes.
I asked my former manager, and now friend and colleague, about the critical partnership between Chief Learning Officers and Chief People Officers. Cara Brennan-Allamano, former CPO of Udemy, Lattice and Planet, emphasized how strategic vision and systems thinking define effective CLO partnerships. She shared, “Aspiring CLOs must think beyond learning programs to understand the entire talent ecosystem. This systems approach to learning and culture becomes even more critical when partnering with technology leaders on the right tools and with revenue leaders on customer impact.”
Rotating through every function as an HR business leader at Adobe built my ability to influence across the organization with different types of leaders, from the Chief Technology officer, to the General Counsel to the Chief Revenue Officer. Each leader required different partnership approaches with a different set of challenges to solve. A pivotal moment in my career came when a senior leader would not discuss talent strategy until we fixed our requisition reporting accuracy. This taught me a fundamental lesson: strategic partnerships are built on a foundation of operational excellence. Leaders trust your expertise only after you have proven you can execute on the basics.
Finding CLO opportunities reflects this partnership-first mindset. Every role in my career came through my network, co-created with leadership before I started. Rather than fitting into predetermined roles, I partnered with CPOs and leaders to shape positions that aligned my strengths with organizational needs. These conversations focused less on traditional qualifications and more on how we could collaborate to drive both immediate and long-term organizational change. We discussed not just current challenges, but how we’d partner to address evolving business needs over the next one to two years.
The most impactful CLO opportunities emerge through strategic discussions rather than job postings. The best CLO roles aren’t found on job boards—they’re built through relationships. This approach lets you shape the role around your vision for learning and organizational development, ensuring alignment with your strengths and the company’s needs.
4. Drive Leadership Development At Scale
Building strong leaders across an organization is one of the primary objectives of a CLO. Great cultures start with great leaders, so every leader must exemplify those values and behaviors, and there are tools, assessments and learning experiences that reinforce and hold them accountable for that. As CLOs, we can’t build organizational culture without leaders who exemplify and reinforce desired values and behaviors in their daily actions.
Throughout my career, I’ve found that the most effective leadership development begins with self-awareness. Leaders must first understand their own operating system before they can lead others. This means defining their “personal culture”—examining how their values and behaviors align with organizational ones, and identifying the specific practices they must model daily. When leaders clearly understand this alignment, they naturally create accountability by demonstrating the behaviors they expect from their teams
When selecting development tools, focus on those that drive individual leadership accountability and scale to team and organizational impact. A consistent approach to development—from executive coaching to team effectiveness—creates a shared language that strengthens organizational culture. This alignment between personal leadership behaviors and organizational values enables meaningful change across all levels.
Janet Van Huysse, my former manager and Chief People Officer at both Twitter and Cloudflare, believes the most effective CLO-CPO partnerships thrive on constructive tension. She valued my ability to challenge conventional thinking, especially when it came to leadership development. This partnership led to meaningful change at both companies. At Twitter, we transformed company values into the “Twitter Core Five”—core skills that defined leadership success. Later at Cloudflare, we created “Cloudflare Capabilities,” a framework that connected values to concrete skills across all roles. Both initiatives succeeded because we started with executive teams first, ensuring buy-in before broader rollout. Managers embraced these frameworks because they clearly linked values to skill development and performance evaluation, demonstrating how strong CLO-CPO partnerships can drive lasting cultural change.
5. Expand And Leverage Your Professional Network
Building a strong professional network is no longer about collecting business cards. It’s about fostering meaningful collaborations inside and outside your organization. The most effective networking happens when you reframe the question from “What can I get from this person?” to “How can I help them succeed?”
This mindset has helped me build lasting relationships with incredible leaders. Throughout my career, I’ve played both mentor and mentee—seeking guidance from experienced leaders while coaching hundreds of others through their own leadership journeys. These relationships thrive on mutual learning: just as I regularly seek advice from peers to challenge my thinking and avoid familiar patterns, I help other leaders examine their organizational challenges from new angles. This two-way exchange of insights and feedback strengthens both individual leaders and our broader professional community.
Building your personal brand is crucial in today’s interconnected world. You’re not just a company representative—you’re a leader with unique values, beliefs and practices that transcend any single role. Understanding your authentic leadership voice helps you make intentional choices about where to work, speak and contribute. For me, this meant focusing on the intersection of culture, learning, leadership and now, AI. This clarity guides my choices about which companies to join, which podcasts to participate in, which communities to engage with, and whom to mentor.
When evaluating opportunities, look beyond the job description to understand the partnership dynamics. Key questions to consider: Does the CLO report to the CPO or CEO? How valued is the CLO’s role in the organization? How does the executive team view learning’s role in business strategy? What’s the relationship between learning and other talent functions?
Jeff Vijungco, a friend, former colleague, and a key strategic partner when he led Talent Acquisition at Adobe, is now a Partner at One North Talent Group, a specialty executive search practice that places Chief People, Talent and Learning Officers for leading Silicon Valley companies. He emphasizes that successful CLO candidates must showcase the impact they have had, both internally and externally. He said, “Share specific examples of how you’ve built successful partnerships to evolve a learning organization. Focus on situations where you’ve influenced without authority, share metrics and outcomes from aligning learning with business strategy, and discuss how you built strong relationships. The most successful candidates demonstrate their ability to drive organizational change through strategic partnerships.”
The Five Steps Working Together
It’s not any single step that leads to becoming a CLO—it’s the combination of strategic learning, influence, and partnerships that shapes your path. You leverage your education to engage in high-level business conversations. You gain industry expertise to connect learning to organizational goals. You build partnerships that drive strategic alignment across functions. You drive leadership development to embed learning into culture and performance. And you expand your network to create opportunities before they even exist. Each step reinforces the next, positioning you as a learning leader and a key architect of business success.
Successful CLOs understand that every initiative, program, and innovation starts with a conversation between trusted partners who share a vision for what’s possible.