The First Use of ‘Chief Learning Officer’ and Many Other Words

This post was written by Jacob McNulty

I stumbled across the site Word Spy today which tells about the first uses of new words or terms.  They list the earliest use of the official term ‘Chief Learning Officer’ as being in 1993 with the following quote:

“So, just as some companies have a vice-president for total quality or an officer in charge of safety, Argyris explains, the CEO decided to have an executive in charge of organizational learning. He divided the HR function into two sets of tasks: record-keeping tasks and other duties that could be placed in a database, and tasks that involved employee education and retraining. The latter functions were to become the purview of a chief learning officer.”
—George F. Kimmerling, “A place at the top for trainers,” Training & Development, March, 1993

I also learned about such terms as ‘wikiality‘, ‘fridge Googling‘ and ‘peoplerazzi.’

Word Spy is worth a peek for a quick brain break.

Tags: business training, Chief Learning Officer, CLO, corporate training, development, learning, learning strategies, organizational learning, professional development, workforce development