In many organizations, learning still lives outside of work.
Employees leave their desks, attend workshops, and then return to their jobs, hoping to apply what they’ve learned.
It’s a ritual we have all participated in, but one that increasingly feels out of step with how people actually grow.
Over the past few years, I’ve observed something different in my own practice.
The most powerful learning moments rarely happen in classrooms.
They occur in the middle of real work—during a difficult client conversation, a failed project, or a team disagreement that forces reflection and adaptation.
This intuition is now being echoed in new corporate trends.
Some organizations—McKinsey recently being one of the most vocal—argue that work itself must become the primary site of learning.
I agree, but not because it’s efficient.
I believe it’s philosophically necessary.
Thanks for reading Fabio Caipirinha’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Beyond “training”: Work as a practice of growth
But the deeper challenge is not just skill acquisition; it’s cultivating judgment, resilience, and self-awareness—qualities no algorithm can automate.
That can only happen in the tension of real work.
When we see our jobs as a series of assignments, we train.
When we see them as a series of exercises in becoming, we learn.
This is not about adding more courses or gamified feedback tools.
It’s about designing work so that it inherently stretches and refines the people doing it—what I call learning-in-action.
Every meeting, every failure, every negotiation becomes part of a personal curriculum.
The rise of the “Human Growth Architect”
But labels matter less than purpose.
What matters is that someone in the organization becomes responsible for one profound question:
“How does this company help its people grow through their work?”
In that sense, I see the future CLO as something larger—a Human Growth Architect.
Not a manager of courses, but a designer of experiences.
Not a bureaucrat of learning hours, but a philosopher of human development inside the system.
This role will require three languages:
- the language of strategy, to link growth to business value,
- the language of technology, to use AI as a developmental partner,
- and the language of meaning, to keep the organization anchored in what it means to be human.
Measuring meaning, not minutes
In the traditional world, learning is measured by hours—how many sessions completed, how many certificates issued.
But growth has never been about minutes spent; it’s about transformation observed.
The true metric of learning is not attendance but agility:
how quickly an organization evolves when its people do.
AI can provide data, but interpretation still belongs to humans.
Leaders must ask: What patterns of courage, empathy, or creativity are emerging?
How do these invisible shifts translate into collective intelligence?
When learning is measured by life instead of logistics, it becomes the bloodstream of the organization rather than its accessory.
Work as a philosophical act
It is about the kind of human beings we are becoming at work.
The Stoics saw life as a gymnasium for the soul.
In that sense, work is our daily training ground—sometimes heavy, often imperfect, but always capable of shaping us.
Each challenge, each frustration, each responsibility refines us if we let it.
AI may outperform us in knowledge, but it cannot replace our capacity to learn through living.
That remains a profoundly human art.
So perhaps the true future of leadership is not managing learning, but restoring the sense that to work well is itself a moral and intellectual education.
When we see it that way, the line between doing and becoming disappears.