Thursday 6 November 2014


The 5 core skillsets for a KM team


Our Knowledge Management Survey continues to throw up fascinating data. It seems that, if we look at Knowledge Management programs world-wide, there are 5 core skillsets people look for in a KM team, although the emphasis varies from one sector to another. 


We provided respondents with seven options for skillsets, and asked them to prioritise them in terms of importance to their Knowledge Management team. The average priority for each skill is shown in the table below, with large numbers being High Priority (marks out of 7), and the frequency in which each was chosen as Highest Priority is shown in the picture above.


From the table, we see that 5 of the 7 skills have almost exactly the average weighting, and statistically we can see these as "equally important". The other two are much lower.

The same 5 are all popular "first choice" skills, with  "Organisation and Industry skills" and "IM and library skills" being the most popular.

These are the average figures. When we look at individual industries, we see some systematic differences, although all 5 skills are well represented in each indutry.


  • Industry skills are strongly favoured by Legal firms (where most KM teams are made up of lawyers and paralegals) with IM/Library skills being a close second, also by the Military
  • IM/library skills are favoured by Professional services firms, with Change Management skills a very close second
  • Facilitation skills are slightly favoured by Oil and Gas, and by Manufacturing
  • Change Management skills are favoured by Construction and Engineering, and by the government sector. 
  • IT skills are favoured by Telecoms companies

Based on the data from the survey, I think we can look at these 5 skills as being the core skillsets needed within any KM team (tweet this)
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