This is the ninth in the series offering practical advice on knowledge management strategies, programs, qualifications, overcoming challenges, and building sustainable KM initiatives. In each post, I answer questions posed to me as if I were a mentor. If you would like to submit questions for me to answer in this series, please send them to stangarfield@gmail.com.
Should I pursue KM certification?
Answer: I don’t recommend KM certification, but some of the associated training can be helpful. Certification is offered by multiple organizations for merely attending a short course. There is usually no actual practice or in-depth examination required to become certified.
When I worked at Washington University School of Medicine’s Biomedical Computer Laboratory, we taught a course called “Introduction to Programming the Laboratory Computer” which was aimed at doctors and other medical professionals. In two days, they were supposed to learn how to program a computer using assembly language. This was not a realistic goal, and most of them could not write a computer program after such minimal instruction and experience.
My colleague, Janet Johnson, and I created a spoof of this course, which we called “Survey of Medical Techniques.” In two days, the course was supposed to teach the entire field of medicine to computer scientists, which seemed just as unlikely as teaching assembly language programming to physicians.
The field of knowledge management spans over 100 KM specialties (see below for a partial list). It is too broad to be certified in as a whole. Doctors get board certified in a specialty, not in the broad field of medicine, and this is only after years of study, practice, and hard work. Taking a one-week class in KM and then being anointed Certified Knowledge Manager is not meaningful and is generally not respected by experienced KM thought leaders.
Certification makes sense for narrow specialties within specific products and disciplines, such as Microsoft, Project Management Institute, and Knowledge Centered Service (KCS). It doesn’t make sense for KM, but an increasing number of organizations are now offering certifications. One respected consultant decided to offer certification as part of a training course, and when I questioned this, the response I received was that everyone else was now doing it, so it was necessary in order to compete. This was discouraging to hear.
Insights from Knowledge Management Professionals
Patrick Lambe
“The CILIP Chartership program is the only one I’m aware of that involves independent professional peer review of a practice portfolio, independent of the purchase of any training products.”
Dave Snowden
“I have no objection to people selling training courses in KM. I have no objection to people developing specific approaches and certifying or accrediting people to practice those techniques. Offering to certify an entire field is nonsense and awarding pretentious appendages to participants’ names is compounding arrogance with ostentation. Look at this if you want to see what I mean: KM Person, CPC, CKM®, MKMP™, CKMI®. At the age of 10 I created a secret society with membership cards, ranks, and medals, but I grew out of it.”
Bill Kaplan
- Professional certification is a designation earned by an individual documenting that the individual has demonstrated a mastery of skills, experience, and expertise within their field.
- Certifications are generally earned from a professional society with the imprimatur to provide an internationally recognized certification to an individual based on a combination of education, experience, and knowledge, rather than solely by passing an exam or just completing training.
- The ongoing process of developing, administering, and maintaining the certification is done to international standards, requires ongoing continuing education, demonstrated experience track record, and often must be renewed/recertified.
- There is an established Body of Knowledge for the subject matter area that is nationally and/or internationally recognized.
- Sitting for the certification examination does not require that you take training from the “certifying” organization.
The Knowledge Management profession does not yet have a standardized, accredited, and recognized certification designation or certification provider that meets the above requirements. There is ongoing work internationally to make this a reality, but it doesn’t exist yet.
What Are Some Alternatives to KM Certification?
If you want to seriously pursue learning about knowledge management, here are my suggestions.
University KM Programs
These are longer than one week, more rigorous, and more expensive. But you will also learn more, and a Ph.D. or M.S. carries more weight than initials such as CKM.
- Bangkok University: Ph.D. in Knowledge Management and Innovation Management
- Columbia University: MS in Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKNS)
- George Mason University: MS in Organization Development and Knowledge Management (ODKM)
Training Courses and Workshops
These are offered by communities and conferences and feature respected speakers.
Free Resources
There is a wealth of content available at no cost. Lucidea has generously made it possible for you to:
- View my 41 recorded webinars.
- Read my 350 blog posts.
- Download my 5 books.
The SIKM Leaders Community has 21 years of content and programs that enable you to:
- Read over 2,600 discussion threads.
- Listen to over 250 recordings of the monthly calls.
- Join the KM Peer Mentoring program to be matched with an experienced mentor.
There Are Over 100 Knowledge Management Specialties
It’s impossible for anyone to know very much about all of these, let alone to become certified in all of them. Instead, try to deepen your expertise in just a few, perhaps some of the below.
- Sharing, culture, organizational design, and change management
- Innovation, invention, creativity, and idea generation
- Reuse, proven practices, lessons learned, and knowledge retention
- Collaboration and communities
- Learning, competency development, and training
- Goals, measurements, incentives, gamification, recognition, and rewards
- Social networks, organizational networks, value networks, and network analysis
- Expertise location and personal profiles
- Communications
- Facilitation and knowledge transfer
- User support and Knowledge-Centered Service
- Content management, document management, and records management
- Analytics, text analytics, visualization, metrics, and reporting
- Project management, process management, Agile development, workflow, planning, decision-making, and checklists
- Knowledge audit, knowledge mapping, knowledge modeling, peer assist/retrospect, After Action Review, sensemaking, and ritual dissent
- Appreciative inquiry, positive deviance, and Most Significant Change
- Storytelling, narrative, anecdote circles, BarCamp/unconference, and World Café
- Information architecture, usability, user interface, and user experience
- Search, findability, taxonomy, ontology, metadata, tagging, and semantic web
- Portals, intranets, and websites
- Big data, databases, repositories, business intelligence, data warehouses, and data lakes
- Competitive intelligence, customer intelligence, market intelligence, and research
- Digital workplace, social business, and social media tools
- Cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, and neural networks
- Wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, and prediction markets
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