Further supporting the contention that KM/knowledge services is becoming more and more recognized in the management community, attention is now turning to how the discipline is taught and how its practitioners might obtain qualifications that support their expertise.

We touched here on the subject in two recent posts. On May 18, we posted KM Education Forum: Educators Seek Consensus at First Annual Summit, in which we included a link to an SMR Special Report on that meeting.

On July 22, we posted KM/Knowledge Services Certification, responding to a query at a LinkedIn discussion list.

Now David Griffiths has come up with a very thoughtful and useful post at the Gurteen Knowledge Community LinkedIn Group. Here’s how David introduces the subject:

This is a blog preview of the content for a magazine article, coming out later this year:

Let me ask you this: Would you hire a financial manager without a CPA qualification? Would you have confidence in their competence? I’ll take a guess that your answer is, probably not! I am not suggesting for a moment that KM can be governed in the same way as the public accounting field. My aim is to highlight the fact that perhaps more attention needs to be given to the education and experience required to work in the KM field…..

I have no problem with ‘Certified Knowledge Manager’ qualifications, if they are really are what they say on the tin, ‘Certified’ – against a set of industry standards that frame the education and experience of the person ‘certified’. I do not believe that it is wise to promote a “de facto standard” for our field that does not apply a framework to assess the “graduates’” competence. Perhaps what we are actually speaking of, in this case, is more an accreditation certificate; such as that offered by Cognitive-Edge. Going back to the CPA example that I used at the outset of this blog, compare the certification framework for the “de facto” standard for accountants with that of the organisation mentioned above. Also, a de facto standard would seem to mean that it has been adopted by industry and academia across the world. This is most certainly not the case. The proof? The Russel Group Universities are 20 of the UK’s top Higher Education Institutions, “committed to the highest levels of academic excellence in both teaching and research,” and none of them recognize the “worldwide de facto standard” for course credit or even entry. How many of the 283 KM vacancies, from around the world, advertised on Twitter during the period between March 2010 and June 2010, requested this de facto industry standard qualification as either an essential or desirable requirement for employment? None! How about the number of companies currently advertising KM jobs on ‘Monster.com’? Are you getting the sense that there is a theme here?

David then provides a link to his blog post The problem with ‘certified’ KM training.

This is an extremely important subject for discussion, and David’s post is highly recommended. I look forward to more discussion now, and to seeing the article when published.

- August 9, 2011