Friday 28 November 2014

The KM job market at end 2014

It has been 2 years since I last looked at KM salaries and three years since I looked at KM jobs. Time for an update!


I took 21 KM jobs from Linked-in, to see what sort of people they were looking for. 
  • 14% (3 jobs) were at a strategic level
  • 19% (4 jobs) were what we could call "KM Champions"
  • 10% (2 jobs) were for "practice owners" - individuals to coordinate knowledge around a particular topic
  • 29% (6 jobs) were for content managers feeding portals for internal use
  • 14% (3 jobs) were for content managers feeding support knowledge bases for service staff or customer use
  • 10% (2 jobs) were for IT staff
  • 5% (1 job) was in fact data analysis, not KM at all. 
In terms of salaries:
  • Glassdoor UK quotes an average salary of about £58,000 pa ($90,000)
  • payscale US quotes a median salary of $75,000, in a range from $47,000 to $116,000, and also includes the graph below showing pay against experience level


  • ITjobs UK contains the two charts below (although bear in mind that a strategic-level KM post would not be advertised in "ITjobs" - these are more likely to be the portal admin type roles).


So what does this tell us?

It tells us that a "knowledge management job" is a wide spectrum of things, from strategic work on a 6 figure salary, to admin work placing content onto portals. You need to read the details of the job advertisement; you cannot tell the nature of the job from the title.

There seems, from the charts, to be a larger number of jobs in the medium range, which I suspect would be the KM Champion and Practice Owner jobs. If you are looking for a career in KM, this may well be the spot to aim for.

There are not a lot of KM jobs out there - only three in the whole of Australia, for example, of which one was about cataloguing documents.



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