Let me say the quiet part out loud: most organizations don't need a Chief Learning Officer anymore.

At least not the way we've traditionally defined it.

I've watched the CLO role get quietly eliminated. The rationale is consistent: "Marketing owns prospect education. Customer Success owns customer education. Sales has enablement. Product has in-app onboarding. What exactly does a CLO do that isn't already covered?"

It's a fair question. And if your answer is "they create training programs and manage the LMS," then yeah, you probably don't need that role.

But here's what those same organizations are discovering six months later: nobody owns the full customer learning journey.

Marketing creates content to attract buyers.

Product builds onboarding to activate users.

Customer Education develops certification to retain customers.

And the experience for the actual human trying to learn? It's fragmented, contradictory, and frustrating.

The future doesn't need a Chief Learning Officer focused on internal L&D or corporate training programs.

The future needs someone who owns the integration of Marketing and Customer Education—the complete learning experience from first touch through expert user. Call it CLO, call it VP of Education and Content, call it whatever makes sense in your org chart.

But this role is essential. And the organizations that figure this out are going to massively outperform those that don't.

The traditional CLO came from corporate learning and development. They focused on employee training, compliance programs, and internal skill development. Many came from academic backgrounds or instructional design.

This made sense 15 years ago when learning was a discrete function—you went to training, you took courses, you got certified, you went back to work.

But that model has been completely disrupted by three shifts:

Product-led growth changed who owns education. When your product IS the first learning experience, education can't sit in a separate department creating courses. It has to be embedded in the product, owned by product teams, and measured by activation and engagement metrics.

Content marketing blurred the line between marketing and education. The best marketing content genuinely educates. The best educational content drives pipeline and retention. Trying to separate "marketing content" from "educational content" is increasingly meaningless.

Customer expectations evolved. People don't want to "take a course" anymore. They want to learn in the flow of work, through short videos, searchable documentation, peer conversations, and AI-powered assistance. The traditional classroom-based, course-centric learning model feels outdated because it is.

So organizations looked at their CLO function—still focused on courses, certifications, and learning management systems—and asked: what are we paying for?

The answer, too often, was infrastructure nobody wanted to use and programs nobody had time to complete.

But eliminating the role doesn't eliminate the need. It just makes the need invisible until the business impact becomes obvious.

Here's what I'm seeing at organizations without this integrated leadership:

Marketing creates educational content that stops at conversion. Brilliant webinars, comprehensive guides, detailed comparison resources—all designed to generate pipeline. Then the prospect becomes a customer and... there's no continuation. The educational journey they started in the buying process doesn't connect to onboarding, product education, or certification. It's a dead end.

Customer Education builds programs customers can't find. I talked to a Customer Education team last month that built an entire certification program. It's genuinely good—well-designed, measured outcomes, real business value. But their certification completion rate? Non-exsistent. Why? Because customers don't know it exists. Marketing doesn't promote it (not their KPI). Sales doesn't mention it (focused on closing deals). Product doesn't link to it (would slow down onboarding). So this valuable program sits unused while customers struggle to get value from the product.

Product teams optimize for activation, not learning. Product-led onboarding is optimized for time-to-first-value. Get users to the "aha moment" as fast as possible. That's important, but it's not the same as helping users understand the product deeply enough to get sustained value. You activate users who churn three months later because they never learned how to use the product beyond that initial workflow.

Enablement works in silos. Sales enablement creates battle cards. Customer Success enablement builds onboarding sequences. Partner enablement develops channel training. All covering the same product, using different terminology, with contradictory positioning. The customer experience is whiplash.

Each team is doing their job well. But nobody owns the integration.

Nobody's asking: what does the complete learning journey look like from prospect to expert user?

How do we ensure each touchpoint builds on the last? How do we measure learning effectiveness across the full customer lifecycle?

That's the gap. And it's costing organizations millions in lost expansion revenue, higher churn, and support costs.

The future CLO—or whatever you call this role—sits at the intersection of Marketing and Customer Education. Their job is to own the complete customer learning experience.

Not courses. Not the LMS. Not training programs.

The learning journey that turns strangers into advocates.

Here's what this looks like in practice:

They own the learning narrative across the customer lifecycle. From the first piece of educational content a prospect encounters through expert-level certification, there's a coherent story about what you can learn, why it matters, and how to progress. Marketing content feeds into product onboarding. Product onboarding connects to customer education. Customer education enables expansion. It's designed as one journey, not four disconnected experiences.

They break down the walls between marketing and education. Educational content drives pipeline. Marketing content serves existing customers. These teams share goals, coordinate calendars, and measure success across the full funnel. A webinar for prospects becomes onboarding content for customers. A customer certification case study becomes marketing proof. Content is created once and leveraged across the journey.

They integrate education into the product experience. Not as a separate "training" you have to take, but as contextual learning built into workflows. The CLO works with Product to ensure in-app guidance, documentation, and educational content are seamlessly connected. When a user gets stuck, they can access help, watch a relevant video, or jump into a learning path—all without leaving the product.

They make education measurable as a growth lever. Not completion rates and quiz scores. Business metrics. Does educational content shorten sales cycles? Does certification correlate with expansion revenue? Does onboarding quality predict retention? The CLO builds the measurement infrastructure that connects learning investment to business outcomes.

They orchestrate, not control. Marketing still creates marketing content. Product still owns onboarding. Customer Success still drives adoption. But the CLO ensures these efforts connect. They provide the frameworks, standards, and coordination that turn individual team efforts into a coherent customer experience.

When this role works, here's what changes:

A prospect downloads your guide on "Building a Customer Education Program." It's genuinely helpful—they implement ideas from it. Then they buy your product. During onboarding, the Customer Success Manager references concepts from that guide: "Remember that framework you read about? Here's how to build it in our platform." Suddenly the prospect's pre-sales learning connects to post-sales activation.

The prospect becomes a customer and starts using the product. The in-app guidance uses the same terminology and frameworks they encountered in the sales process. When they want to go deeper, there's a clear path to certification that builds on what they've already learned. The learning journey feels continuous, not fragmented.

That customer completes certification and starts getting more value from the product. Marketing asks to feature them in a case study. That case study becomes educational content for other customers and prospects. The customer becomes an advocate because they genuinely understand the product and can articulate its value—which they learned through a coordinated educational journey.

Meanwhile, the organization can measure the impact. They know that prospects who engage with educational content close 30% faster. Customers who complete onboarding within the first week have 2x higher retention. Certified users expand their contracts at 3x the rate of non-certified users.

Education isn't a cost center. It's a growth engine.

Here's the controversial part: this role doesn’t have one single place they can sit.

You can make the argument that this role should probably sit in Marketing or report to the CMO.

I know that feels wrong to people from traditional learning backgrounds. Marketing is about selling, education is about teaching—they're different functions with different goals.

But that separation is exactly the problem.

The best marketing IS educational. And the best education drives business outcomes. When you separate them organizationally, you create artificial boundaries that hurt the customer experience.

At HubSpot Academy we did both: reported to Customer Success and Marketing at different points in my tenure there.

However, if your Customer Education reports into Customer Success you have to maintain cross-department coordination with Marketing. Marketing will still create dozens of educational webinars, guides, and resources for prospects. Customer Education will build a comprehensive certification program for customers. Without communication and alignment it falls apart… fast.

The content covered will be the same topics using different frameworks. The terminology will be inconsistent. Prospects will learn one methodology in a marketing webinar, then encounter a completely different approach in customer onboarding. It will be confusing and undermined trust.

Where do I think this should sit? It may change organization to organization but at the intersection of Marketing and Customer Education will strong ties to product - which I often find leaves you reporting to a Chief Customer Officer.

The CCO advocates for education budget because it clearly drives pipeline and retention.

I'm not naive about the politics here. Putting Customer Education under Marketing or directly under a CCO can make Customer Success leaders nervous. They worry (reasonably) that education will get optimized for marketing metrics at the expense of customer outcomes.

This is a legitimate concern. I've seen it happen. Marketing cares about leads and pipeline. Customer Success cares about adoption and retention. If education only gets measured on marketing KPIs, customers suffer.

The solution isn't organizational separation. It's dual accountability.

The CLO/VP of Education role needs goals that span the funnel: prospect engagement AND customer activation AND retention AND expansion. They're accountable to both the CMO and CCSO. Their success requires both functions to succeed.

This is uncomfortable. It means working across reporting lines, balancing competing priorities, and navigating politics. But that discomfort is the point. Integration is hard. If it were easy, it would already be happening.

The alternative—keeping marketing and education separate—is comfortable. It's also failing.

Let me get concrete. Here's what a CLO/VP of Education owns in this integrated model:

Customer Learning Strategy: The complete learning journey from prospect through advocate. What does someone need to learn at each stage? How do learning experiences connect? Where are the gaps? This is the strategic roadmap that guides all educational content and programs.

Content Architecture: The frameworks, taxonomy, and standards that ensure educational content is consistent, discoverable, and reusable across marketing and customer touchpoints. Not creating all the content, but providing the structure that makes distributed content creation work.

Key Learning Programs: Certification, academies, community education—programs that require cross-functional coordination and directly drive business metrics. These programs integrate marketing content (for awareness and enrollment) with deep educational content (for skill development) and product integration (for application).

Education Marketing: How do we make customers aware of learning opportunities? How do we promote certification? How do we demonstrate the value of education to prospects? This isn't traditional product marketing—it's marketing the learning experience itself.

Measurement and Optimization: Connecting learning activity to business outcomes across the full customer lifecycle. Which educational touchpoints correlate with faster closes, higher activation, better retention, more expansion? What's working and what needs to change?

Cross-Functional Orchestration: Facilitating coordination between marketing, product, customer success, and enablement teams. Not controlling their work, but ensuring educational efforts connect rather than conflict.

If you're creating this function or evolving an existing CLO role, here's my advice:

Start with the customer journey, not the org chart. Map every learning touchpoint from first awareness through expert user. Where are the gaps? Where do experiences conflict? What would a seamless learning journey actually look like? Build the role around fixing those gaps, not around traditional functional boundaries.

Position it where it can influence both marketing and customer experience. This probably means reporting to the CMO or COO, not buried in Customer Success or HR. The role needs enough organizational authority to coordinate across functions.

Hire someone who understands both sides. You need someone who gets content marketing AND instructional design. Growth metrics AND learning science. Pipeline generation AND customer adoption. This is a unicorn profile, but the role doesn't work otherwise.

Measure business outcomes from day one. Not completion rates and satisfaction scores. Revenue metrics. How does education impact pipeline velocity, win rates, time-to-value, net retention, and expansion? Build the measurement infrastructure early and report on it consistently.

Start small and prove value. Don't try to centralize all learning immediately. Pick one high-impact integration point—maybe connecting marketing webinars to customer certification, or building an integrated onboarding experience that spans product and education. Prove that coordination creates measurable value, then expand from there.

You don't need a Chief Learning Officer if you define the role as managing the LMS and creating compliance training.

You absolutely need someone owning the integration of Marketing and Customer Education if you want to build a scalable, efficient growth engine.

Your prospects are already learning about your category, your product, and your approach. The question is whether you're intentionally designing that learning journey or leaving it to chance.

Your customers are already learning how to use your product—either through your intentional education or through trial and error. The question is whether that learning experience drives value realization and expansion or creates frustration and churn.

Your organization is already creating educational content—across marketing, product, success, and support. The question is whether those efforts reinforce each other or work at cross purposes.

The CLO role, reimagined as the integration point between Marketing and Customer Education, is how you move from accidental to intentional. From fragmented to connected. From cost center to growth driver.

Call it Chief Learning Officer. Call it VP of Education. Call it Head of Customer Learning. The title doesn't matter.

What matters is recognizing that the future of customer acquisition and retention requires someone to own the complete learning journey—and giving them the authority, resources, and organizational positioning to actually do it.

The organizations that figure this out will massively outperform those that don't. Not because they have better products or smarter marketing, but because they help customers learn faster, apply knowledge more effectively, and achieve value more consistently.

That's the role. That's the opportunity. That's why it matters.

Learning by Design is written by Courtney Sembler. Courtney currently helps companies build scalable customer education programs. After spending over a decade scaling HubSpot Academy globally, she now explores the systems, strategies, and realities of workplace learning, leadership, and customer experience—the kind that drives retention, adoption, and revenue by design, not by accident. Published twice weekly with monthly deep dives. Connect with her on LinkedIn and subscribe to Learning by Design.