Learning for a Living
This month I joined a law firm, Akerman LLP as their first Chief Knowledge Officer. I am very excited about this opportunity as I believe that Knowledge Management is a must-have in an information-rich and document-heavy vertical like the legal industry, which like many other professional services firms, is facing market pressures and disruption of its own. I also believe KM as a discipline has not come into its own just yet. There is a lot of good work yet to be explored in holistically tying together emerging enterprise knowledge needs with technology, revising outdated business practices to keep up with the changing nature of work and opening up honest dialog with clients regarding information governance (more on this in a later post). As soon as my LinkedIn profile reflected my job change, I received a number of congratulatory notes and calls from former colleagues and friends. A few of my former colleagues and mentees asked me for career advice and professional development tips. I don't have a list of Do's and Don'ts because everyone's approach will be different, but will share some personal knowledge management efforts that have helped with my professional development.
Stay connected with peers
Earlier in my career, networking was synonymous with a way of having a 'hook' in various companies. This would help with future recommendations or during job hunting to find out the real story behind a company that you were interviewing with. If you were in sales, networking was a no-brainer. Not many thought of it as a way to stay in touch with colleagues over the course of our entire careers, as a way to learn and grow, as a way to expand our mind's horizons and as a way to build our own cheerleading team. Today professional social networks have enabled that and help in much deeper and meaningful ways, in a large part because they are online - taking away the work out of staying connected.
I am connected to many in the KM world and already familiar with the work of bloggers who focus on Knowledge Management, Workplace Learning, Community Building and Enterprise Social Collaboration. But law firms have their own very established KM community of practitioners. My LinkedIn network has provided me a number of former colleagues who now work in law KM or know others who do. One of my former colleagues offered to connect me to someone she knew in law KM, someone as it turns out is an annual conference committee member in ILTA, the largest trade association in the legal technology and KM world. Each contact, old and new, has offered helpful advice, ideas, suggestions on bloggers, books, associations and conferences. I wouldn't expect this kind of a ramp up even a few years ago, in a pre-LinkedIn era.
Build a personal library
Digital Notebook : Create a digital notebook of interesting facts that you learn through your social updates, blogs, and other readings and that would be useful for reference at some point in your career, whether it is for presentations, business cases or even blogging. I use Evernote which is a handy tool for web clipping as well (there are others like Microsoft's OneNote, although it wasn't mobile ready till recently). I have used social bookmarking tools like Delicious before, but found Evernote to be more versatile.
Curated Magazine : With the volume of information out there on any topic, consuming content by creating a personal customized magazine, is a healthy and sustainable habit. Start with a collection of practitioner and consultant blogs, books, sites, trade publications, vendors, association discussion forums. It's easy to follow bloggers and domain specific publications on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. More viewpoints add to a diversity of thought and can spark creative ideas in your own projects. However social feeds can get overwhelming very quickly, even with nifty features like the Twitter 'lists' and searching by hashtags. To make sure I was not missing any of the good stuff and not drowning in the feeds, I have set up my own curated magazines through FlipBoard and Paper.li (these have filters of their own and will describe those in detail in another post). I use these for my personal knowledge management, but could possibly publish them in the future. Robin Good's guides to content curation tools are the best ones I have seen yet.
Digital Identity Protection : One of the best things I did for myself (finally) in 2014 was set up all my passwords with a Password Manager, an essential step in protecting my digital identity and footprint. The Wall Street Journal had a good overview of online password managers that can be a good starting point to learn more.
Challenge yourself to think differently
Change is a good thing and challenging the way we think or have thought all along is a very good thing. Change may be painful, but like a good workout, it ends up exercising muscles you never knew you had. This goes beyond changing jobs or roles. Changing or at the least, challenging personal viewpoints qualifies for significant character building as well. In my earlier post titled, Cultivate Networked Knowledge, I had referred to the the danger of only listening in on echo chambers (as David Weinberger calls them) and being plugged into an internet that is too personalized. In the same vein, it's an enriching habit to tap into new disciplines, authors and bloggers as exposure to different viewpoints.
Blog
My first anniversary post last year explained how blogging about work had helped me to learn, grow and connect. For a much more evolved viewpoint on blogging, please read the venerable Om Malik's anniversary post (celebrating 12 years of blogging!). Blogging is something that most consultants do, it can be a great sales channel, but I would recommend non-consultants to do it as well. Even as a practitioner, one has a lot to share and if anything, we are all (especially KM practitioners) internal consultants to our organizations. Dan Pink's 'To Sell is Human' is a great read if someone needs convincing.
If possible, meet up
An interesting chapter in Simon Kuper's book 'Soccernomics' posits a theory of 'Why England loses and others (in Western Europe) win' in soccer games. I am paraphrasing, but he attributes it to the power of networks and geographical proximity. He likens the enthusiastic spread of soccer in continental Europe to what happened during the scientific revolution when interconnected scientists exchanged ideas faster in a shared language (Latin) and built on each other's ideas. Copernicus (Poland) wrote that the earth circled the sun, Galileo (Italy) confirmed the idea through his telescope observations and so on.
Working in a city with a concentration of firms similar to yours means you are working mere blocks away from peers, who face, struggle with and solve similar professional challenges. When connected through online networks, meeting in person may seem unnecessary. I would argue that it is still worth the investment in time and effort. If you work in a big city, take full advantage and meet your industry peers in person to exchange ideas and war stories.
Finally, know thyself
As we go through our careers, what we learn on the job, from our peers or through our formal education pales in comparison to what we learn about ourselves. Developing a sound understanding of how we tick-and-thrive is critical to our own success in business.
I have used this line before in my blog (the last time I took on a new job), 'We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.' (Mary Catherine Bateson). My advice in 4 words - LEARN FOR A LIVING.
