1.
New Roles, New Skills for the 21st
Century Knowledge Professional
19 March 2013 Steve Dale
Collabor8now Ltd
Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative
International Society for Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
Knowledge Organization License.

2.
The Proposition
•Social media is generating enormous amounts of unorganised
content - how to find what’s relevant.
•New opportunities for collaboration are made possible by social
media and social networks.
•There are a bewildering variety of methods and tools - how to
choose the right ones.
Making sense, connecting, collaborating, and using
technology throw up the need for new skills: what
are the new roles and the new skills?

3.
3
Part 1: the
environment

4.
Some
say.....
Venkatah Rao: http://enterprise2blog.com/2008/09/social-media-vs-knowledge-management-a-generational-war/

5.
6
Source: http://scoop.intel.com/what-happens-in-an-internet-minute/

6.
Useful And Relevant Information? 7
• 40 % of accounts and 8% of messages on social media sites are
robots or spam
• 24% of people have missed witnessing important moments because
they are too busy trying to write about them on social networks
• 40% of people spend more time socializing online than they do face-
to-face (source: AllTwitter)
• The web contains more than 8 billion pages
• There are more than 2.27 billion people online (doubled since 2007)
• There will be more than 10 billion mobile Internet-connected devices
in 2016, exceeding the world's projected population at that time of 7.3
billion. (source: Cisco)
• Worldwide mobile data traffic will increase 18-fold between 2011 -
2016, reaching 10.8 exabytes per month (source: Cisco)
• 85% of the people who work in social media have been in the
industry for less than 2 years.
Sources include: http://thesocialskinny.com/216-social-media-and-internet-statistics-september-2012/

7.
10
Part 2: new
roles, new
literacies

8.
11
Traditional
Literacy
•Reading, writing,
speaking, listening,
Digital Literacy Information
•Ability to use digital Literacy
technology, •Ability to identify
communication tools what information is
and networks to needed and the ability
locate, evaluate and to locate, evaluate and
create information use information
Today’s
Tool Literacy (new)
•Ability to use tools to
manage, consume and Literacy Visual Literacy
•Ability to understand
create information
and produce visual
messages
Media Literacy
•Ability to question, Critical Literacy
analyse, interpret, •Ability to question,
evaluate and create challenge and evaluate
media messages the meanings and
purposes of texts
Source: Dr Daniel Churchill, www.learnactivity.com

9.
Digital literacy
is not an
option...it’s a
matter of
survival!

10.
There’s also “Network Literacy”
20th Century 21st Century
•Limited Social Interaction •Pervasive Social Interaction
•Value in Transactions •Value in Relationships
•Business Stability •Business Flux
•Well-defined Industries •“Long Tail” business models
•One-way Markets •P2P Markets
•Limited Information •Information Abundance
•Resource Abundance •Resource Constraints
Communities &
Institutions
Networks

11.
Two Emergent Roles for
Knowledge Professionals
Community Social/Digital
Management/Facilitation Curation

12.
Community Management
Communicator,
Selection Criteria
Highly respected in their
disseminator, curator,
field, knowledgeable,
evangelist
team leader, curator
CoP External CoPs
Firewall
Communicator, coach, Communicator, listener,
disseminator, curator, brand promoter, soft
Open access
evangelist cheer-leader
Open Internal Social Brand & Marketing
Network Communities
Intra-organisation External world
Adapted from an original by DominiqueTureq:
http://www.boostzone.fr

13.
16
Digital Curation
© http://dilbert.com

14.
17
What is
“digital
curation”?

15.
18

16.
Aggregation & Filtering
in g c e
in d a n
F le v
Re
19

17.
Digital/Social Curation - some of the tools
“Curators” use their insight into a
particular audience to determine what
might interest them

18.
Take-aways 21
• Social Media is ubiquitous. The numbers keep getting
bigger. But we’ve sacrificed quality for quantity and
accuracy for timeliness
• Routine tasks are being outsourced. Repetitive tasks are
being done by machines/robots.
• Community Management and Digital Curation roles are
emergent: relying on skills that can’t easily be automated
• The most important skills for a 21st century knowledge
worker are the ability to network and socialise.

19.
Sources/References
• Venkatah Rao: http://enterprise2blog.com/2008/09/social-mdia-vs-
knowledge-management-a-generational-war/
• Cara Pring - Social Media & Intranet Statistics:
http://thesocialskinny.com/216-social-media-and-internet-statistics-
september-2012/
• Graphic - what happens in an Internet Minute:
http://scoop.intel.com/what-happens-in-an-internet-minute/
• Today’s New Literacy: Dr Daniel Churchill, www.learnactivity.com
• Community Manager Quadrant: DominiqueTureq:
http://www.boostzone.fr
Other photos and images sourced from Google images and iStock
Photos.

20.
“It’s not the strongest of the
species that survives, nor
the most intelligent, but the
one most adaptable to
change.” Darwin
Email: steve.dale@collabor8now.com
Twitter: @stephendale, @collabor8now
Profile: http://about.me/stephendale
Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.