About Us
Cedar Knoll Group was established in 2016 as a strategic consulting firm that partners with senior HR, learning, and talent leaders to design workforce strategies tied directly to business outcomes. We help organizations move beyond reactive planning and toward intentional, future-ready approaches to reskilling, upskilling, and talent development—built for the complexity of modern business environments.
Rooted in real-world experience across large-scale organizations, we understand the dynamics that shape how work actually gets done: governance, stakeholders, legacy systems, and the people navigating all of it. We exist to strengthen the leaders driving transformation, equipping them with the frameworks, language, and strategies to influence at the highest levels and deliver lasting impact.
Our Services
Explore our range of comprehensive consulting services designed to address your specific business needs and drive sustainable growth
90-Day Strategy Sprint
A 90-Day engagement utilizing CKG’s Learning Strategy Blueprint Model to design and deliver your organization’s learning strategy, capability roadmap and measurement framework.
Fractional Leadership
Embedded senior learning leadership for organizations that need a Chief Learning Officer’s strategic capability without the full-time commitment.
Executive Advisory
Strategic counsel and on-call expertise for leaders and executives who want a senior thinking partner.
Why Partner with CKG?
The workforce is shifting faster than most organizations are equipped to keep up with. Research from the World Economic Forum, McKinsey and others consistently shows that the majority of executives rank skills gaps as a top business risk. Yet only a fraction of those same executives believe their L&D function is ready to close them. The gap between urgency and readiness is where the bigget opportunities, and risks, live.
The Expectation Gap
is growing.
Executives increasingly expect L&D to operate as a strategic function tied to business outcomes, but most learning organizations are still structured, staffed and measured as support teams. The mandate has changed, but the infrastructure hasn’t caught up.
Skills are expiring faster than organizations can respond.
Between AI adoption, automation and shifting business models, the half-life of technical skills continues to shrink. Organizations that treat skilling as a one-time event rather thana continuous system are falling behind.
Technology sprawl is undermining impact.
Most enterprises have accumulated a patchwork of learning platforms, content libraries and talent tools with no unified strategy connecting them. The result is redundant spending. fragmented data and no clear line of slight into what’s actually working.
L&D has to prove its
value in ROI.
Boards & CFOs want workforce readiness data, ROI on investments and predictive capability models. Most L&D teams don’t yet have the measurement frameworks to answer those questions confidently.
Our Process
CKG follows a structured, repeatable process that moves from understanding where you are today to delivering a workforce strategy that is aligned, measurable and built to evolve with your business.
1 Evaluate Current Strategy
Using design thinking, map out current procees to identify the greatest opportunities.
2 Design a Business Plan
Build a formal business plan outlining key initiatives, timelines and measures of success.
3 Align Stakeholders
Bring business plan to key stakeholders to formalize the engagement
4 Execute & Launch
Put the project plan in motion to design and deliver, always working to stay on time and on budget.
5 Analyze & Optimize
Measure against Kirkpatrick's Model and make adjustments as needed.
6 Ongoing Monitoring
Setup ongoing governance and maintenance to maintain cotinued effectiveness.
Who We Work With
An impactful learning strategy shouldn't be a luxury reserved for Fortune 100 companies. CKG partners with organizations of every size to bring clarity, structure, and momentum to how they train, reskill, and upskill their people—turning learning into a genuine driver of business performance.
Start-Ups
Our founder brings deep experience advising EdTech start-ups from the rare vantage point of the target customer and the end user. Whether you're refining your product roadmap, sharpening your go-to-market message, or pressure-testing how your solution fits into a crowded learning tech ecosystem, we'll help ensure you're building something buyers actually need and can't wait to adopt.
Mid-Market
Mid-market organizations are often at the most exciting—and most challenging—inflection point: growing fast, scaling teams, and outpacing the informal learning approaches that worked when you were smaller. CKG helps you build the right learning foundation for where you're headed, not just where you've been. From establishing scalable onboarding and leadership development programs to integrating AI-powered tools that punch well above your weight, we deliver enterprise-caliber strategy designed for the speed, agility, and resource realities of a growing business
Enterprise
For large, complex organizations, the challenge isn't usually a lack of learning—it's alignment, integration, and impact. CKG brings hands-on experience leading enterprise-wide transformations at both Fortune 500 companies and PE-Backed private tech companies. We've consolidated fragmented platforms, rolled out upskilling and reskilling strategies to tens of thousands of employees, and tied learning directly to measurable business outcomes. Whether you need a fractional CLO to drive a specific transformation, executive-level thought partnership for your existing L&D leader, or a strategist who can translate complex priorities into a cohesive narrative for your C-suite and board, we're built for the scale and sophistication you require.
Meet our founder
Rose Sheldon, Founder & Fractional Executive
For more than two decades, I've been obsessed with one question: How do we build organizations where people are genuinely excited to learn, grow, and do their best work?
That obsession has taken me from the front lines of sales training to the C-suite of Fortune 500 companies, where I've had the privilege of leading enterprise learning transformations that move the needle on what matters most: business outcomes, employee engagement, and the readiness of the workforce for whatever comes next.
I believe learning should be democratized, not gatekept. I believe AI is the most exciting accelerant our industry has ever seen—when it's deployed thoughtfully and in service of people. I believe the best learning strategies don't live in an LMS; they live in the daily fabric of how teams work, decide, and grow together. And I believe a well-told story can move an organization further than the most polished strategy deck ever will.
When I close my laptop, you'll most likely find me on the sidelines of a soccer field or in the stands of a hockey rink, cheering on my two kids (who keep my husband and I simultaneously proud and perpetually on the road). We call the far northwest suburbs of Chicago home—a community we love.
When a rare quiet moment surfaces, I'm probably out on the golf course working on my swing, or unwinding with a good glass of wine and even better conversation. I've found that the best ideas—about learning, leadership, and life—tend to show up somewhere between the 14th green and the second pour.