Knowledge Manager Lifespans Getting Longer?

In 2008 I ran a global survey on knowledge manager professional development and experience. It found that only 29% of knowledge managers had been in their role for more than 4 years, and only 25% were confident of moving on to another KM role. The average “lifespan” among respondents was something like 2.5 years.

Nick Milton recently surveyed his KM contacts on LinkedIn and found that knowledge managers average lifespan seems to last about 6 years – which shows progress! About 60% will survive beyond 4 years, double my figure a decade ago. However, only about 25% of his subjects are likely to have had a longish (8+ years) career in KM. Progress, but slow progress!

2 Comments so far

Nick Milton

Thanks for the link Patrick!

In fact 55% of the people I looked at were still in a KM role, with an average KM lifespan to date of 9.5 years. 45% had completed their career, and of these, 24% had a career of over 8 years. If you take both graphs together, then about 40% of the people I looked at had had, or were still in, a KM career of more than 8 years.

I am not a good enough statistician to be able to combine the two graphs and come out with an average KM lifespan.

However you also have to look at the dataset, which is “people I have a first level KM connection with on LinkedIn”, and who have a Knowledge job title”. This dataset may skew towards the people with longer KM careers. If we really wanted to see if things were improving, we would rerun your survey.

Posted on October 05, 2018 at 09:22 PM | Comment permalink

Patrick Lambe

Thanks for that clarification, Nick - maybe we should rerun that survey?

Posted on October 05, 2018 at 10:34 PM | Comment permalink

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