December 19, 2008

Quick & Dirty: Additional Thoughts on KM Certification

Well, so much for posting on "the regular" with my Quick & Dirty posts. I've been staying on the grind and hustling to get roll-out and present the proposed FY09 KM strategy and haven't had much time for any kind of consistent blogging, but I've had tons of thoughts on topics so I'll try to kick those out quickly and silence my guilty conscience.

So, back in May I did a post on KM Standards and Certification and after working on my 'Curriculum' post I started thinking more on what a proper certification program should look like for KM.

For starters, I (the royal 'we') wouldn’t want to take a program that covered information from a very high-level. Which, of course, doesn't help the newbies to the field.

I would imagine that the best course of action would be to offer two tracks - one for KM professionals and one for non-KM folks. The non-KM professionals track would be for folks who are looking to understand KM from a high-level, they may or may not be planning a career in KM, they might just be interested in developing their own understanding of (KM for Finance, KM for Marketing, KM for R&D, etc.).

The KM professionals track could start with the essentials (which could be skipped over for KM professionals who are past this point and jump right into the meat…well, maybe there could be a quick, fast-track course to cover some critical essentials, but it would be a survey class featuring highlights - nothing intensive or in-depth. However, the “meat” of the courses in this track would focus both on a combination of theory and practical application. The theoretical courses would be more focused on forward thinking aspects of the field or, perhaps, focused applications of KM, stuff that goes beyond the standard discussions and day-to-day applications of KM, in fact, stuff in these courses can generate courses in practical applications of KM. Conversely, the practical courses would focus on the day-to-day applications of KM - knowledge audits, metrics development, strategy design and implementation, KM branding, and so forth. Personally, if I was actually in the market for getting certified (as a newbie and maybe as a practicing professional), I'd want a course or program that gave me useful tools as well as some background on the field, the thought leaders, a timeline of the field – critical events, guiding thoughts, principles. I think that these are types of 'knowledge tools' that a quality program would help one to acquire.

Just sayin'.

Sigh, one down, hahahaha.

1 comments:

Mario said...

Good initial thoughts. I, too, have been thinking about a KM curriculum. In fact I have been tasked with heading up a focus group/working group on the same subject; development of a KM certification and training curriculum.
Additional thoughts I have had on this subject include the KM 101 being the KM principles and essentials, KM 201 understanding of the various kinds of strategies for Knowledge Management (i.e. Personalization, Codification, Knowledge Creation, etc.) and KM 301 could focus on the competencies for being a knowledge manager, to include what competencies are best for various size and types of organizations.
...just thinking.