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Mar 8 What is that thing? What the heck is that? (With apologies to Steve Martin).

Friends and contacts ask me what I'm looking to do in my next career, and it isn't always clear what to call the role. What do you call a job that where people do things like:

These are some of the elements of what I've been calling knowledge manaegement. But given the relatively few positions out there, I suspect that other people use different terminology. If you focus on information, you might go one direction. If your focus is on learning / training you might go another. And being in the market for KM-type roles, I find that searching the job listings for "knowledge management" to be not the most fruitful activity out there. I've looked for the IBM-emphasized term "social business," and for "collaboration," and other combinations.


Of course, one of the reasons I enjoy the area of knowledge management so much is that there are many different ways to approach it: organizational design, technology, information science, learning, innovation, anthropology, etc, etc. That makes for interesting definitions - they all depend on your approach.

These thoughts are inspired by a lunch with Johanna Rothman, author of Hiring The Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science Of Hiring Technical People (and several others). There's even a chapter on "what do you call that" when job titles don't exist.

[Photo: "Unknown seaweed" by J Brew]


Mar 10 Shiny new toy syndrome

Mar 3 Acknowledge your constraint


Mar 1 What does knowledge jolt do


Feb 18 What is culture