Suffolk’s Head of HR Talks About the Unique Value Learning Brings to the Table Education is the thread that ties Dave DeFilippo’s career together. After college, he taught Spanish at a high school and coached the track team. He worked his way up the training ranks at UPS and held corporate learning roles at Comcast and Capital One. He eventually became chief learning officer at BNY Mellon, helping navigate the financial services giant through the depths of the Great Recession and the subsequent recovery. In what spare time he had, Dave earned a doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s CLO program. Learning is in his blood. So in 2015 when he joined Suffolk, a Boston-based construction management company, as its first CLO, he looked forward to building out a first class learning function for the growing company. What he didn’t foresee was taking on the rest of the company’s HR operations. It wasn’t part of the initial plan. In this podcast recorded live in Boston at the Chief Learning Officer Breakfast Club event, we talk to Dave about the moment when his CEO asked him to become the company’s chief people officer, the particular strengths that CLOs like him can bring to the position and what his experience means for other learning executives.