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Profile

Published February 2008

Sun’s Karie Willyerd: Weaving a Web of Learning

  

  Brian Summerfield

One of the most unique aspects of the learning industry is the many paths people take to become leaders in the field. Whereas many CFOs — to cite just one example — will have spent their entire careers in finance, a large number of learning executives will have professional backgrounds that include long stints that aren’t related to employee development.

Take Sun Microsystems’ Vice President and Chief Learning Officer Karie Willyerd. She took a somewhat unconventional and roundabout road to her current role, starting out as a journalist for newspapers and magazines. She decided to change careers a few years afterward, though, and earned a master of science in instructional and performance technology from Boise State University and an executive doctorate in management from Case Western Reserve University.

Once Willyerd got her academic credentials, she took a job authoring training materials for Prentice Hall. Then, she worked for a flight simulator company, which she eventually parlayed into an instructional design and development role at Lockheed Martin. Not long thereafter, she became the head of learning at that company.

After rising through the ranks of the learning industry over several years, Willyerd deviated from it to some extent when she took a job as chief talent officer at Selectron, a provider of security and convergence technology solutions.
“That was really helpful,” she said of the experience. “That role was interesting because I was on the CEO’s staff and got to see how they were running the company. That helped prepare me for this role, because I got to see all the details involved with what it takes to survive in a low-margin business.”

She got back to her roots nearly two years ago, when she was hired on as vice president and CLO of Sun Learning Services. The company’s learning function is responsible not only for the development needs of approximately 34,000 employees globally, but also one of the largest customer-facing training programs in the world, Willyerd said.

“It’s a very large organization,” she explained. “When you get to a learning organization of this size, it’s not just about the top person. It’s really about the team. If you try to do it all yourself, you’re doomed.”

This daunting size was part of the reason Willyerd was brought on board. In what was previously a decentralized organizational structure, she became a CLO to CLOs around the world.

“That was a fairly dramatic organizational change for Sun,” she said. “The CLO role did not exist before I was hired for this position. Not only did we create that at the top of the organization, but we also decided to create a structure of CLOs to support various audiences around the world: customers, partners, employees and communities. Whereas formerly some of our CLOs might have just run our learning business or run employee learning, when they got named chief learning officer, they all had to start wearing several hats: running the business of learning, doing employee learning, training our partners and working with universities to get our content into their programs. We now have a total of 16 CLOs who report to three regional CLOs.”