11 Learning and Development Leaders in New York State

Jonno White
Aug 9
7 min read

Capability is now one of the sharpest constraints on what a large company can actually do. Strategy decks assume people will be ready for the next change, and learning leaders are the ones who have to make that assumption true.

This is a compiled directory of eleven senior learning and development leaders whose current roles sit inside publicly listed companies headquartered in New York State. It reaches from Manhattan trading floors to Purchase in Westchester County, and it covers banking, investment, insurance, ratings and analytics, payments, consumer goods, beauty and pharmaceuticals.

The number is smaller than the working title we started with in 2026, and that is deliberate. Every person here has a current, publicly stated remit at a listed New York State company, and each entry offers one specific piece of work that another practitioner can learn something from.

Why this group is worth watching

New York State concentrates an unusual mix of capability problems in one place. A global bank, a ratings agency, a payments network, a beauty house and a pharmaceutical company all need people to work well under pressure, but the shape of the pressure is completely different in each one.

That variety is what makes the group useful to read across. A measurement idea built for a ratings business can be tested inside an insurer. A brand led approach to learning content can be borrowed by any organisation whose identity is part of what it sells.

1. Kerryann Benjamin

Managing Director and Global Head of Talent Development and Culture, KKR

Kerryann Benjamin is Managing Director and Global Head of Talent Development and Culture at KKR, working from the firm's New York office. She joined KKR in 2021 and now leads the firm's global talent development strategy alongside its work on culture. Before KKR she spent nineteen years at Goldman Sachs, where she was head of human capital management for the consumer and wealth management business and, earlier, head of firm wide programming and digital learning.

That combination is the interesting part of her remit. Culture is not built by a values statement, it is built by the programmes, career paths and everyday tools people actually use. Putting development and culture under one leader makes that link explicit rather than leaving it to chance.

2. Jesse Jackson

Firmwide Head of Learning and Career Experience, JPMorganChase

Jesse Jackson is the firmwide Head of Learning and Career Experience at JPMorganChase, and he is based in New York. His function supports more than 250,000 employees worldwide, covering the global management, direction and strategy of learning across the bank. He joined the firm through its Management Development Program after five years of active duty in the United States Navy, and he later earned a doctorate in education at New York University.

The title itself is worth noticing. Joining learning and career experience in one remit says that a course only matters if it changes what someone can do next. For anyone running development at scale, that is a useful test to apply to every programme on the calendar.

3. Peter Fox

Global Head of Learning, Citi

Peter Fox is Global Head of Learning at Citi, a role the bank also describes as chief learning officer. He joined Citi in New York after leadership roles in Zurich, London and Melbourne, and he sits on the GSV Workforce Insights Board. In April 2026 he took part in a fireside session at the ASU and GSV Summit on building capability for an artificial intelligence accelerated enterprise.

He also opens the door for other practitioners. Citi's New York headquarters hosted the iVentiv Learning Futures exchange in March 2026 at his invitation. Convening peers is a quiet form of leadership, and it tends to raise the quality of thinking across a whole profession.

4. Jennifer Gabriele Miller

Global Head of Learning and Development, Global Markets and Early Career, Citi

Jennifer Gabriele Miller is Global Head of Learning and Development for Global Markets and Early Career at Citi. She co-hosted the iVentiv Learning Futures New York exchange with Peter Fox at Citi's headquarters in March 2026, bringing global heads of learning together for two days of practitioner led discussion.

Holding global markets and early career in the same remit is unusual and quite deliberate. One side is a highly technical, fast moving business, the other is the pipeline that will run it in a decade. Designing for both at once forces a learning function to think about capability over a much longer horizon than the current financial year.

5. Catherine Kevett

Global Head of Enterprise Learning and Development, MetLife

Catherine Kevett leads enterprise learning and development globally at MetLife, covering leadership, professional skills, mandatory learning and the insurer's artificial intelligence capability work. She joined MetLife in 2022 after fifteen years at Johnson and Johnson in human resources business partner, talent management and learning roles.

She has also brought the iVentiv Learning Futures New York exchange into the MetLife Building on Park Avenue more than once. Repeat hosting is a slower kind of contribution than launching a new programme. It builds the relationships that let learning leaders be honest with each other about what has not worked.

6. Kate Brown

Global Head of Talent, S&P Global

Kate Brown is Global Head of Talent at S&P Global, working from the company's Lower Manhattan base. Her remit is to build a talent ecosystem that attracts strong people and then creates real opportunity for them once they arrive. She joined S&P Global in 2018 after leading global talent capability and assessment at The Estée Lauder Companies.

Talent and learning sit together in her brief, which matters in an analytics business. When the product is judgement applied to data, capability is not a support function. It is the thing being sold, and treating development as an operating priority rather than a benefit follows naturally from that.

7. Paul Tiesler

Senior Vice President, Talent Development and Learning Strategy, Moody's Corporation

Paul Tiesler is Senior Vice President for Talent Development and Learning Strategy at Moody's Corporation, where he leads global learning strategy for more than 14,000 employees across more than 40 countries. He built the firm's enterprise generative artificial intelligence learning programme, which was followed by a 40 per cent increase in artificial intelligence tool adoption and earned a Brandon Hall Excellence Award. He is a member of Harvard's Learning Innovations Laboratory.

His measurement work is the part other practitioners can borrow. He pioneered Moody's Net Impact Score, a framework built to show behaviour change and learning transfer rather than completion rates and satisfaction scores. Choosing the measure before the programme starts is a small discipline that changes what gets designed.

8. Emily Lin

Chief Learning Officer, Mastercard

Emily Lin is Chief Learning Officer at Mastercard, whose global headquarters sits in Purchase in Westchester County. She moved into the role in 2022 after a decade at Citi, where she was Director and Global Head of Learning and Development for operations and technology. She was named to Women We Admire's list of the top 25 women chief learning officers of 2025.

Her presence is also a useful reminder that senior learning leadership in New York State is not only a Manhattan story. Payments sits where regulation, technology and trust meet, so capability has to be built for people who cannot afford to get the detail wrong.

9. Chrissie Leibman

Chief Learning Officer, PepsiCo

Chrissie Leibman is Chief Learning Officer at PepsiCo, working from the company's headquarters in Purchase, New York. Her published brief is to reimagine the future of learning by building a strategy and ecosystem that is unifying, agile, learner centric and technology enabled. She came to the role after more than twenty years designing learning strategies across retail, consumer goods, quick service restaurants, healthcare and startups.

Following a leader early in a redesign is instructive. The first year of any learning transformation reveals what the organisation has quietly decided to stop doing, and that is usually more informative than the launch announcement.

10. Tulie White

Chief Learning Officer, The Estée Lauder Companies

Tulie White is Chief Learning Officer at The Estée Lauder Companies, leading learning for a group of prestige beauty brands run from New York. She reached the role after enterprise learning and development leadership inside the same company, and she co-authored a piece for Training magazine on creating digital learning experiences that stay on brand.

That on brand argument travels well beyond beauty. In an organisation where identity is genuinely part of the product, learning content that sounds like it came from somewhere else tends to be ignored, however sound the instructional design behind it.

11. Sarah Blendermann

Vice President, Learning and Development, AI Tech Fluency and Digital Foundations, Pfizer

Sarah Blendermann is Vice President for Learning and Development, AI Tech Fluency and Digital Foundations at Pfizer, which is headquartered in New York. The job title is the distinctive part. Naming artificial intelligence fluency and digital foundations inside a learning role turns two things that are usually treated as technology projects into an explicit capability brief.

For a regulated science business that matters more than it might elsewhere. New tools only create value once people can use them correctly and explain what they did. Putting that responsibility inside learning rather than inside a technology rollout is a deliberate structural choice.

Conclusion

Three themes run through this group. The first is that the strongest learning leaders here are building systems rather than catalogues, because a system keeps working long after the launch communication has stopped.

The second is that measurement is quietly improving. A net impact score built on observed behaviour change, an adoption figure tracked after training and a completion rate weighed against a stated target all show a profession moving past attendance and satisfaction.

The third is that scope is widening in a very particular direction. Learning briefs that name artificial intelligence fluency, career experience or culture alongside development are a signal that capability is being treated as an operating question rather than a training budget.

If you lead one of these functions, the practical move is to pick one entry from a sector unlike your own, take a single idea, and name the condition that would have to be true for it to work where you are.

About the Author

Jonno White is the author of Step Up or Step Out and a Certified Working Genius Facilitator. The Working Genius framework was created by Patrick Lencioni and The Table Group.

Jonno is based in Brisbane and works with schools, organisations and leadership teams around the world on the everyday habits that make senior groups work well together.

CLARITY