5 findings from 100 KM jobs in 10 Months
Over the last 10 months I have been tracking Knowledge Management jobs to see if the field is shifting or remaining stagnant.
I looked at 100 KM jobs that have been advertised on job sites in the UK, Australia, United States, Canada, India, Singapore and Republic or Ireland over a ten month period..
I will be publishing this data in a KM journal, but the headlines suggest that the KM world is exactly where it always has been:
84 of 100 jobs (84%) were IT based or IT centric, requiring specific IT experience (e.g. Sharepoint) and skills as a pre-requisite (note: this relates to IT as a focus of the role and not the ability to use, for example, Microsoft Office suite).
Only 7 of 100 (7%) required a specific Knowledge Management qualification and even here the qualification could be substituted for experience - the vast majority required an undergraduate degree/work experience (work experience/qualifications generally being either professional (having worked in a specific field (e.g. law) or IT-based).
Only 1 of 100 (1%) required experience of formulating HR practice to improve knowledge acquisition, sharing, use and creation.
91 of 100 (91%) specifically mentioned "content creation" or similar terminology.
Only 14 of 100 (14%) specifically mentioned partnership approaches (e.g. learning/training and development or Human Resources).
Knowledge Management really doesn't appear to be moving away from its information-based roots.
KM practice is still driven by content and "hard" knowledge as a primary objective.
Knowledge Management seems to remain the domain of specialists who operate in silos - the problem is that these "specialists" appear to be focused on information and not knowledge - and the requirement for KM generalists is the exception and certainly not the rule.
The bottom line? KM largely remains the domain of information "specialists" in organisations that really needs "generalists."
Of course, this can change. But will it happen in time for the field to still remain relevant?
