The not so formal KM job track

Jack Vinson shares his thoughts on whether there is a job track "for people studying knowledge management". His short answer is simple: "No." In his longer answer, Jack lists several options for KM professionals and goes on to say that

I heard a lot of discussion of boundary-spanning instruction and research. Similarly, I suspect that "real KM" jobs fit between the lines of formal hierarchies (...) makes them harder to find and describe in traditional corporate environments.

As I know from first hand experience, there are not too many jobs coming up when you enter "knowledge management" on any job search engine, but as Jack says, they are harder to find and to describe. Nevertheless I do know these jobs are there and I have done one for five years that was even formally called KM. My current job does not have the KM tag on it, but nevertheless means KM. Some are called by different names, some are embedded in departments you would at first sight not associate with KM, and some simply need to be shaped in order to become KM jobs.

Every organisation I know of has problems that KM offers the solution for. As Denham Gray says on his blog:

In common with others, we have key insights locked in e-mail threads, useful ppt presentations and Word docs hidden on multiple hard drives, process dos and don'ts that are not updated, useful heuristics that walk with staff turnover, business intelligence that is gathered but not sifted, collated or dispersed, vendor and customer feedback that gets lost or never relayed.

There are a lot of intersections with HR, strategy, IT and many more and some tools are simply too good not to aim for a quick and dirty solution that shows the benefits of KM and makes management ask for more. I believe blogs and social software can be such a quick and dirty solution to a lot of the problems large organisations face. And this is where KM comes in, as the base to provide meaningful solutions to common problems that - for some reason - have been around for a while but not yet tackled.

So, Jack is right, there is no formal career track. But there is a multitude of tracks you can pursue with KM and this makes the topic potentially more interesting. Maybe you dont even want to know what your exact job description or job title will be in five years time.