Chief People Development Officer

Job description

Work with a Top 20 CPA and advisory firm that Accounts for Anything. Aprio has 40 U.S. office locations, as well as international office locations and more than 3,200 team members that speak 60+ languages across the globe. By bringing together proven expertise, deep understanding, and strategic foresight for fast-growing industries, Aprio ensures clients are prepared for wherever life or business may take them. Discover a top-rated culture, vast growth opportunities and your next big career move with Aprio. Aprio is in a period of intentional transformation — growing through acquisition, investing in technology and AI, and reshaping what it means to be a modern professional services firm. The **Chief People Development Officer (CPDO)** is a strategic architect of that transformation from a people and capability standpoint. This is not a program administration role. The CPDO will own the firm's people development strategy and serve as a critical thought partner to the Chief People Officer on workforce strategy — bringing deep capability and skills expertise to inform how Aprio builds, develops, and deploys its talent in a profession being reshaped by automation and AI. The CPDO reports to the Chief People Officer and is a key driver of Aprio's Value Creation Plan, specifically the Unmatched Talent pillar. ### Core Responsibilities: **1. Workforce Capability Strategy** - Define the capability model Aprio needs to execute its business strategy — today and over a three-to-five year horizon — accounting for the impact of AI, automation, and evolving client expectations on the profession. - Advise and inform the CPO's workforce composition decisions — bringing a skills and capability lens to questions of onshore/offshore mix, technology displacement, and new role creation, and translating those decisions into learning and development architecture. - Serve as an internal subject matter authority on skills, capability gaps, and readiness for strategic initiatives including M&A integration, new service line development, and market expansion. **2. AI and Transformation-Era Learning** - Develop and implement a firm-wide AI learning strategy that builds employee fluency, confidence, and practical capability to work alongside AI tools — not as a one-time initiative, but as an ongoing and evolving program tied to adoption and business outcomes. - Design reskilling and upskilling pathways that address the real displacement and role-evolution risks facing staff at all levels as the profession transforms. - Ensure learning programs keep pace with the rate of change in the business — adaptive, modular, and measurable rather than episodic. Stay connected to the business to develop proactive development solutions driven by their business transformations. **3. Development Strategy and Curriculum Design** - Design and execute a comprehensive, differentiated learning strategy that addresses the needs of diverse talent segments: campus hires developing foundational skills, experienced staff deepening technical expertise, and senior leaders navigating strategic complexity. - Build and oversee curriculum across technical, leadership, and professional development domains — ensuring content is relevant to Aprio's specific practices, segments, and client context, not generic. - Experiment with and establish new modes of learning to account for changes in the historical apprenticeship model. - Establish rigorous learning measurement: move beyond completion rates to demonstrable impact on performance, retention, and business outcomes using OKR methodology and defined KPIs. **4. Leadership and Career Development** - Build and sustain leadership development programs that create a robust internal pipeline — from emerging leaders through partner-track candidates — reflecting Aprio's growth trajectory and succession needs. - Partner with HRBPs and business leaders on individual development planning for high-potential and key talent, ensuring development is connected to real career paths and not siloed from talent review processes. - Design compelling career development frameworks that serve as a retention lever — giving employees visible, credible pathways to growth within the firm. **5. Technology, Operations, and Budget** - Own the learning technology stack — selecting, implementing, and evolving platforms that expand accessibility, personalization, and scale of learning delivery. - Manage the L&D P&L, including annual budgeting, resource allocation, and ROI measurement. Make the investment case for initiatives in business terms. - Ensure all programs meet relevant regulatory and compliance requirements (AICPA, PCAOB, and other applicable standards), integrated efficiently rather than treated as a standalone workstream. ### What We’re Looking For: The right candidate thinks like a business strategist who happens to own learning and development – not the reverse. Specifically: - Demonstrated ability to connect development strategy to business outcomes in measurable terms, leading with business impact before program design. - Experience building or scaling an L&D function in a high-growth, acquisition-active, or transformation-era organization. Stability-era CLO backgrounds are a poor fit for this moment. - Credibility and fluency in workforce strategy conversations — comfortable presenting to and pushing back on senior business leaders, not just operating within the People function. - A track record of building AI or emerging-technology learning programs — not studying it, doing it. - Comfort with ambiguity and iteration. Aprio is actively building, not optimizing a mature system. The CPDO will need to make decisions with incomplete information and adjust quickly. - Strong relationship-building capability in a matrixed organization where influence matters more than authority. Willingness to collaborate with other People + Culture leaders to deliver holistic support to our clients. ### Qualifications: - Bachelor's degree required; Master's in Education, Organizational Development, Business, or a related field preferred. - 12+ years of progressive experience in learning, talent development, or workforce strategy, with at least 5 years in a senior leadership role with enterprise-wide scope. - Proven experience designing and implementing learning strategy in a professional services, regulated industry, or high-growth environment. - Demonstrated experience with AI learning programs, digital learning platforms, and emerging instructional design methodologies. - Strong financial acumen — budget ownership, ROI modeling, and the ability to make resource trade-off decisions with confidence. - Experience supporting or leading the learning dimension of M&A integration is a meaningful differentiator.