Knowledge Management Job Description

Great topic @Daniella Place! I’m tagging in a few KMs to see who can share their thoughts and expertise on this (others please chime in too): @BethAnne Freund @Jacob Touchette @Michelle Williams @John Ingram @Stacey Soleil @Gabriela Boska @Chris Aleman 

I think this will depend on the maturity of your knowledge management efforts. I tend to find myself in roles where we are introducing new KM processes, so change management (and anxiety management) plays a large part in my day-to-day work. I imagine this is less applicable in organizations where KM is well established. 

Having some experience with information architecture and user experience would be beneficial for anyone who is managing a large body of content--establishing taxonomies, designing category or tagging schema, developing templates to improve readability, etc. This is really useful in the design stage, but equally useful in the redesign stage.

Thanks for the tag @Chris Anderson and GOOD question @Daniella Place. It sounds like @John Ingramhas some solid feedback pertaining to the direction of the KM role you’re looking to fill. In my case, I have a hybrid role within the company, so my time and expertise is being pulled in many different directions. Eventually we will need to expand the KM team to fully enhance the UX of our knowledge database, but for the time being I’m attending these Guru trainings to get some best practices going.

100% agree with @John Ingram about the maturity level playing a big role here. 

For example like 6 years ago when the KM program I was involved with was in its infancy I spent my days writing docs, finding SMEs, and managing content. Gradually this shifted to a more structural management (tags, board IA, SME relationship building) and now I’m in a much more organizational role (feature rollouts, user research, user management & permissioning) while also consulting with other teams on their KM efforts to instill best practices and ensure proper resource sharing. 

Sharing another KM job description here if it’s helpful, from @Steve Randle at Splunk (also, please share out if you know of anyone who may be interested in applying)!

Splunk (my team) is hiring a Knowledge Manager which is a global role and the candidate can live in any city.  Goes without saying we us Guru as the KM platform.  This is a role with high visibility as we are using it in a department of 1,100 people and other departments are looking to follow our lead and join the platform.  You can reach me on LinkedIn if anyone is interested.

Great question @Daniella Place ! @John Ingram  @Stacey Soleil  @Jacob Touchette  those insights about your roles and team evolutions are super helpful. I’ve been working with some folks on this topic for our next Deep Dive, all about “Making the Case for Knowledge Hires.”  If you’re free, you should stop by! Find out more info here.