Organizations struggle to keep up with volatile world events, quickly-evolving business plans, and changes in the way employees work and learn.

Becoming Strategic Chief Learning Officer

L&D teams can be so much more than supporting players in their company’s success. With the right leadership, L&D can play a pivotal role in organizational growth and business development. Robust employee training and development can help companies stay agile and competitive in a quickly changing technological landscape. It also plays a critical role in attracting and keeping the best talent.

L&D for Company's Success

All of this is only possible with buy-in from the leadership team. A strategic Chief Learning Officer can coordinate with leadership to make sure that L&D gets the resources and support it needs to enact real change. To earn that seat in the C-suite, L&D leaders need to develop a long-term plan to coordinate their department with larger company goals and initiatives. Whether you’re already a CLO or you aspire to be one, we’ve put together a solid plan to help you evolve your L&D department from a supporting player to an essential partner in the growth of your organization.

L&D Leaders

A strategic Chief Learning Officer can coordinate with leadership to make sure that L&D gets the resources and support it needs to enact real change.As the role of L&D becomes more critical to growing businesses, the job description of CLOs evolves from simple training managers to key players in shaping a more effective workforce.

The evolving role of Chief Learning Officer

To transform L&D into a key strategic partner, it’s not enough to simply oversee learning operations; you need to integrate them with the organization’s goals. The Transformer CLO’s goal isn’t just to help employees learn specific skills; it’s to challenge their capabilities and create a growth mindset.Similarly, the Strategic CLO is interested in more than just skill development. They want to ingrain learning and development into every aspect of the company. The Strategic CLO’s goal is to irrevocably tie L&D functions to a larger company strategy.

What is a Strategic CLO?

A Chief Learning Officer, CLO for short, is a senior-level executive who oversees all learning and employee development programs within an organization. They create learning strategies, oversee their execution, and ensure that all educational programs align with larger company goals. CLOs are also sometimes called Chief Knowledge Officers or Directors of Learning and Development. They typically report either to the head of HR or directly to the CEO.

What is a Chief Learning Officer (CLO)?

Studies show that most <a href="https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/478187/2018%20Retention%20Report/Work%20Institute%202018%20Retention%20Report%20043018%20-%20Final.pdf?__hstc=163589856.4254433c0ab7da05d722fc0e8f88a8c4.1610564977111.1610564977111.1610564977111.1&__hssc=163589856.1.1610564977112&__hsfp=662265997&hsCtaTracking=41368a2d-809b-4c8f-8e7a-e195fe5797b5%7C8141e251-f703-4a71-95f7-7cd1c49d7dce">employee turnover is preventable</a> and that one of the biggest reasons employees leave is a lack of suitable opportunities for growth and development.

Why employees leave?

The Strategic CLO knows that L&D must be at the core of attracting, developing, and retaining the top talent needed to propel the company forward.To facilitate that progress, Strategic CLOs must tackle the dual opportunity and challenge of digital transformation. The Strategic CLO is interested in more than just skill development. They want to ingrain learning and development into every aspect of the company. The Strategic CLO’s goal is to irrevocably tie L&D functions to a larger company strategy.

What does Strategic CLO do?

1. Misalignment between business and learning strategyL&D teams that don’t tie their departmental goals to large company initiatives and strategies will find it almost impossible to obtain the C-suite buy-in they need to grow. Most L&D teams operate reactively. They respond to training needs as they arise, but they don’t proactively plan strategic learning initiatives. To prove their relevance and encourage growth, leaders need to shift to a long-term mindset by setting departmental goals that align with and support larger business goals.

1/3 major challenges L&D departments face right now

2. L&D teams are overwhelmed and underequippedA scarcity of resources is a major limiting factor on most L&D teams’ ability to think proactively. It’s challenging to make the space to set strategic objectives when your days are eaten up putting out fires. Top-down L&D teams are responsible for running <a href="https://360learning.com/blog/training-needs-analysis/">training needs analysis</a>, creating or purchasing courses, outlining learning paths, and regulating employee compliance.The solution is to leverage L&D more effectively by restructuring the way the company as a whole approaches learning.

2/3 major challenges L&D departments face right now

3. The reluctance of the business team to invest time in learning activitiesA lack of buy-in from leadership severely handicaps what L&D can accomplish. This isn’t just about training budgets. Apathy towards corporate learning has a trickle-down effect throughout the company. Getting that investment in new learning initiatives means speaking to executives on their own terms. To get the C-suite on board, you must shift the perception of L&D from a support team to an important player in executing more extensive strategic plans.

3/3 major challenges L&D departments face right now

A comprehensive guide for Chief Learning Officers or aspiring CLOs to turn their L&D department into a strategic organizational asset.

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Our Roadmap for Becoming a Strategic Chief Learning Officer

Why are almost a quarter of children unable to write effectively when they leave primary school?

The Fundamental Question

Start by reading different books and texts.Over time, that’s a lot of exposure to the same words and sentence patterns. And a great number of them, by sheer repetition, will have worked their way into your mental schema for sentence structure — in other words, your tacit understanding of how sentences can be constructed.

Why are some children so much better than others?

According to linguistics researchers Dan Slobin and Thomas Bever, children build up schemas are ‘formed on the basis of linguistic experience and are used for recognising utterances as interpretable.’As words and sentences pour in to our consciousness, we become attuned to a variety of sentence forms and build a map in our long-term memories of the rules for putting sentences together when we want to speak or write.There are many reasons why children find it difficult to write, but let’s look at two very crude examples of hypothetical children who many of us will recognise.

What are the children in our classes drawing on when they construct a sentence?

Many primary schemes of work impose a very high cognitive load on pupils , both visual and auditory.Most learning journeys, instead of moving from concrete to abstract, work the other way, from the big picture to the smaller details.

The Problem

The starting point for these units is very often a huge, abstract idea such as ‘plot development’ or ‘creating characters that the reader can empathise with’. Multiple elements are presented to the children all at the same time.While novice and struggling writers are trying to wrap their heads around such mysteries, they are also expected to use a whole range of grammatical devices successfully in their writing. In many unit plans, reference to these grammatical devices, the building blocks of language, will be fleeting — miss your chance to properly understand them and it may not come round again for a while.

Even messy

<ul><li>Start by reading different texts</li><li>Create mental connection</li><li>Start by writing small meaningful sentence</li><li>Don't look at the quality first</li><li>Slowly write complex texts and different types of narrations</li></ul>

What can we do?

It’s worth noting that this ‘quarter’ could well be much more than that, given that writing is teacher-assessed and overwhelmingly not moderated (and in the 25% of cases where it is moderated, the…

Our Roadmap for Becoming a Strategic Chief Learning Officer

How should we teach writing in primary schools?

Ria SK