Career evolution is on the minds of many intranet professionals. Whether you are a content editor, a knowledge management worker or a design specialist, it can be difficult to know how your career can evolve or what skills you need to make that next step.
At Mercer, a global provider of consulting, outsourcing and investment services, the Knowledge Management team has implemented a structured approach using a winning combination of standardized job families and career tracks. Find out what you can learn from Mercer to keep your intranet team motivated and engaged!
A single framework for a decentralized organization
Mercer has a small central knowledge management team, with worldwide responsibilities, and a large number of business, function and regional teams and resources. The organization is historically strongly decentralized, which presented the challenge of finding a ‘common language’ across all businesses, functions and regions.
A first step to address this challenge was to create standard titles, roles, and job families and define responsibilities for each KM role.
“Creating this framework was an important opportunity for Mercer to standardize its knowledge management roles and responsibilities. It helps employees know where they fit into the structure and what career opportunities they have,” stated Marcia Robinson, Mercer’s global leader of Knowledge Management.
Three distinct tracks for knowledge management professionals
The actual framework consists of four KM job families: knowledge management, content management, content development and design. For each of the established roles within each job family, Mercer created role profiles defining:
- Career levels
- Focus and activities
- Skills required
- Competencies needed
- Learning opportunities to pursue
- Key performance indicators based on a balanced scorecard (clients, people, process, financial)
- Career ideas
Within these job families, Mercer is able to give advice on three career tracks:
1. How to move in: This is the track for those who are currently ‘outside’ and are interested in a job in knowledge management. An example is a Global Knowledge Manager who previously had been a product manager within a line of business. She had experience in applying knowledge sharing activities to support her product, which lent itself well to stepping into a broader knowledge management role. When the Global Knowledge Manager position opened up for her line of business, she applied and was awarded the role.
2. How to move out: This is the track for those who have been for some time in the KM role and are looking for other opportunities elsewhere in the organization. An example is a Global Knowledge Manager who rotated into a regional business operations role. Using her knowledge of the business — including the client needs, the services and products the line of business offers, and her established networks — the employee seamlessly stepped into the regional operations role.
3. How to progress within the function: This is the ‘lifetime’ track for those who want to stay in the field of knowledge management and want to move up within the function. An example is a Knowledge Coordinator growing into the Knowledge Manager role. As the employee’s skills matured — progressing from focusing on technology and process to applying content knowledge and critical thinking skills — he assumed more responsibility building a holistic global KM strategy for his business.
Internal response to knowledge management career paths
After more than one year of operation, feedback from staff has been positive. One line of business knowledge manager commented that she and her KM team use the career framework regularly to identify what’s expected for each person in their role, what skill level the employee should be at, and how to address annual goal setting needs, particularly development and learning.
The framework also aided this manager when she needed to fill a vacant position by confirming the skills she should recruit for. The manager has also personally used the framework to see where she fits into the spectrum and to learn where her areas of opportunity are.
Benefits
The framework not only helps the employees, it helps their supervisors, too. During the yearly performance review discussion, supervisors use the tool to shape a concrete conversation with their team members about career goals and learning requirements for the coming year and beyond.
“The biggest benefit for employees is that it creates clarity about what is expected from them. It gives them the knowledge and power to determine their career and helps supervisors prepare for career discussions,” Lisa Weber, member of the Global Knowledge Management team and project leader for the career development framework.
Another benefit of the career path system for Knowledge Management is that it is integrated with the company’s overall HR system. Roles and job descriptions are aligned with the internal recruiting system and process managed by HR. Managers can consult the KM career framework to aid with the onboarding of KM employees.
What we can all learn from Mercer’s approach
Many companies have job families and job descriptions in place. Mercer’s career tracks are an additional level beyond the classic approach. The career tracks are reminiscent of the ‘use cases’ business analysts prepare as part of a product requirements document. Good use cases are key to designing and developing useful systems. In many organizations, the ‘how to move out’ use case is lacking. Mercer has proven that transferring out of a knowledge management function into a business line function can be done — and bring benefits to all parties. Food for thought for those organizations where people still feel ‘trapped’ in their current role!
Learn more
- Learn from the best: Join us at the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia (8 to 10 May 2012) and Aarhus (6 to 8 November 2012). Both conferences feature a dedicated full-day intranet conference track.
- Share with the best: Join one of our many J. Boye intranet groups across Europe and North America, and share your intranet experience with your peers in other organizations.
- How does your intranet measure up? How strong are your social, collaboration and mobile intranet features? We’ll tell you as part of our intranet benchmarking!
Many thanks to:
This article was made possible thanks to the contributions from
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| Marcia Robinson, Global Knowledge Management Leader, Mercer | Lisa Weber, Global Knowledge Manager Strategy, Mercer |
