How CTDOs Can Stay Up to Speed

The executive talent officer’s job is to attract, develop, and retain highly skilled, productive, and engaged employees. CTDOs have to fully understand the global workforce and know where and how to move employees and their work. At the top of their agenda is creating a comprehensive talent strategy and a talent ecosystem to assess and continuously develop people to fill jobs that don’t even exist yet. All that, plus implementing robust learning and development opportunities to leverage the potential of all employees.

The opportunities for an executive talent officer to add value and influence the business are endless. Being savvy, strategic, and influential, as well as an expert in the field of learning and development, talent management, organization development, and company culture, is essential for success in 2017 and beyond.

Fortunately today there are some excellent developmental opportunities that can assist these leaders with gaining the skills needed to become effective talent executives:

• The Wharton Graduate School of Education CLO doctoral program. This executive program draws faculty from the world-renowned Wharton business school. The comprehensive curriculum covers leadership, learning, business acumen, technology, evidence-based decision making, as well as a doctoral dissertation.

• The University of Southern Mississippi doctoral program in human capital development. As part of the Jack and Patti Phillips Workplace Learning and Performance Institute, this PhD program focuses on real-world experiences and research on driving a successful talent strategy.

• Bellevue University’s online PhD in human capital management. This program focuses on building organizational performance skills in finance, accounting, learning, leadership, knowledge management, and business strategy.

• University of Pennsylvania Executive Doctoral CLO Program. This university program prepares chief learning officers and other learning executives for success in their role as learning and talent development leaders. The program helps participants build the skills necessary to ensure successful learning initiatives that will align with their organization’s strategy.

In addition to those academic degree programs, there are several developmental programs available for gaining the skills needed to become a world-class talent executive. And, of course, ATD also has an extensive number of learning experiences for seasoned learning executives. It provides various books, online publications, conferences, and certification programs for talent executives around the world.

In fact, ATD 2017 International Conference & Exposition in Atlanta May 21-24 offers many learning opportunities. I hope you can join me for my session, The Chief Talent Officer: The Evolving Role of the CLO. We will discuss the key strategies to becoming an effective chief talent officer and how to evolve your L&D function into a talent function in your organization.

For more on the evolving role of the CLO to chief talent officer, read my [article](http://contentviewer.adobe.com/s/ATD Publications/b35a044d-304d-5dae-a64e-5f380d39b009/CTDO Spring 2017/08_HotTopic_v.html) in the Spring 2017 issue of CTDO.