KM jobs, what are they looking for?

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"Knowledge Management" is a poorly defined term, so when you see a job advertisement for "Knowledge Manager", just what exactly are they looking for? What is that job likely to entail?

I did a quick survey of the last 25 job vacancies I have seen that were labelled "KM" or "Knowledge manager", and found the following

• 20% were looking for work in strategic KM - looking to develop or promote the sharing and re-use of knowledge for business benefit - the sort of work I like to do
• 20% were looking for portal designers and technicians.
• 16% were looking for content management or content publishing
• 12% were looking for sales people to sell KM software
• 8% were looking for people to provide CoP support

then the rest were looking for

• a web designer
• a SharePoint technician
• a person to support collaborative technology
• a taxonomist
• a data miner
• a role which said "Knowledge Management" on the email, "Knowledge and information management" on the job description title, and looked to be 100% IM from the description itself.

So there's still a real spread out there. It pays to read the job description carefully - I know of more than one example of a knowledge manager thinking they knew what job they were going for, and finding it to be radically different in practice.