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

The Critical Role of Subject Matter Experts

Subject matter experts (SMEs) make two broad contributions that are both essential to KM:

♦ They drive talent development by mentoring up-and-coming professionals, leading communities of practice, and contributing their expertise to knowledge resources.

♦ They help KM and the business work smarter and faster by managing content, building taxonomies, recommending tools, serving on KM steering committees, and more.

Many organizations recognize the importance of these contributions and have formalized the SME role. For example, over half of our respondents (57%) expect their SMEs to engage in KM activities; nearly half (43%) provide resources to support that engagement.

When we asked KM professionals to identify the most important skills for SMEs to master (see Figure 3), “sharing their wisdom” was the top response by nearly 30 percentage points. “Sharing wisdom” may sound like a simple activity at first glance, but it hides a lot of complexity. Not every expert is a natural teacher or mentor, and many will benefit from training and resources that prepare them to effectively share what they know. Many leading KM programs also have formal processes for knowledge transfer for which SMEs will need to be trained.

Put simply, KM programs and their organizations need to make substantive investments in growing and developing SMEs for them to contribute in the most effective ways. When SMEs have the support they need, they are a powerful force for knowledge sharing, knowledge reuse, and collaboration within organizations.

The Future of KM Careers: Opportunities and Uncertainty

Many KM professionals are confronting an uncertain future when it comes to their careers. For example, 62% of the mid-career KM professionals we surveyed (those with 3–5 years of experience) said they were uncertain about their future or didn’t see a future career path in KM.

Opportunities for career advancement— or a lack of them—are at least partially driving this uncertainty (see Figure 4). Only 39% of all our respondents agreed that they have a clear path for career advancement. Without a path to developing more advanced skills and roles, it makes sense that many KM professionals have a hard time imagining a future for themselves in KM.

Our discussions with KM practitioners bear out these datapoints. For example, one roundtable participant told us, “The nature of my work is KM, but we don’t have a formal KM program in my organization. My role is a team of one with no clear progression.” Especially in cases where professionals aren’t working within a KM program, the path to the next KM opportunity may not be very obvious.

This does not mean that KM professionals lack ambition or ideas about their professional future. When we asked about their preferred career path, these were the top five desired roles:

♦ A management role overseeing a team or department (32%)

♦ Subject matter expert (14%)

♦ Consulting (11%)

♦ Stay in same position (11%)

♦ Project or program manager (9%)

While most people want to remain in KM, 5% of respondents said they would prefer to leave the KM field for another area as their preferred next major career step. The emergence of AI is likely to open additional career opportunities for KM professionals. So far, we’ve found that organizations are beginning to seek new KM adjacent roles such as these:

♦ Knowledge AI strategist

♦ Content intelligence lead

♦ KM experience designer