Future-Ready Knowledge Management: Skills, Roles, and Career Paths in Transition

♦ Facilitation and Human-Centered Design

At its core, KM is about people. Nearly all of our respondents (93%) identified communication and active listening as top skills for KM; 87% cited relationship building.

KM professionals play a key role as connectors and facilitators within their organizations by doing the following:

• Driving a culture where communities of practice and other resources are in place to build trust and encourage peer-to-peer sharing, learning, and problem-solving

• Using storytelling to make knowledge relatable, memorable, and actionable

• Helping to identify, elicit, and transfer tacit knowledge

The facilitation skills that many KM professionals bring to the table enable them to make valuable contributions both inside and outside of KM.

♦ Process and Governance Expertise

More than three-quarters of our respondents (76%) identified process management as a key skill for KM today. Process management skills for KM include the following:

• Creating governance frameworks that encourage contribution and high-quality information

• Managing the lifecycle of content and knowledge from creation through reuse and from new hires to those about to retire

• Designing taxonomies and metadata strategies to help organize information and knowledge for easy findability and to prepare for advanced technologies such as generative and agentic AI

These skills help to bring structure to knowledge flow while improving findability, reducing duplication, and preparing organizations for AI.

♦ Technology and AI Fluency

KM professionals don’t need to be tech wizards, but they do need to be able to understand and guide the use of digital workplace tools. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63%) cited technology fluency as a key skill; 37% are already engaging with AI in their work.

Tech fluency, along with human-centered skills such as facilitation and design thinking, enable KM professionals to serve as translators between technical teams and business users. This helps to make implementation more effective and keeps technology focused on adding business value.

♦ Change Leadership and Adaptability

About three-fourths of our respondents (74%) identified change management as a core skill for KM; 79% cited emotional intelligence.

These skills aren’t just “nice to have.” Emerging technologies such as AI are bringing changes both large and small to organizations across industries. Providing people with the right resources and support to navigate change successfully is one of the most important contributions that KM makes to the business.

♦ Building Skills for the Future

KM’s priorities are shifting. While identifying, mapping, and prioritizing critical knowledge was the top priority for KM teams in 2024, we found that incorporating AI and smart technology is the highest priority in 2025. Nearly half of respondents (44%) also said that operational efficiency and process improvement were the business priorities most important to KM today.

These shifting priorities mean that KM professionals will need to build new skills for the future, including these:

• AI literacy to understand and demonstrate AI use cases

• Prompt engineering, both for their own use and to train others

• Digital ethics and data fluency to provide appropriate oversight and governance for AI

• Cross-functional agility and business acumen to drive process improvements and efficiency across the enterprise

A large majority of KM professionals are investing in their career growth to build these skills. For example, about 3 out of every 4 respondents (73%) said they had participated in KM-related professional development in the past 2 years. More than half (54%) used internal programs for their professional development; 84% said they leveraged external resources including conferences and webinars.