Hi, My Name is Joe and I’m a ‘Knowledge Worker’
by Joe McKendrick
A couple of weeks ago, Jon Husband provided us with some insights on the coming wave of “digital natives” that will be driving our workplaces and businesses, intermingling with the “digital immigrants.”
One thing both many digital natives and immigrants have in common — and have had for at least two decades — is they fall under the category of “knowledge worker,” meaning they spend their days analyzing and packaging information, versus baking bread or restoring houses or fighting fires or flying passenger jets or driving passenger trains. (Though these professionals all require a good deal of knowledge.)
Management guru Peter Drucker — prescient decades ahead of his time as always — coined the term “knowledge worker” back in the 1950s, and the term began to take hold in our imagination in the 1980s.
But, at least 56 million of us knowledge workers in North America can’t go home and coherently explain to our kids or explain at parties what we do. As Johnathan Spira puts it in a recent column in KM World:
“In a casual setting, such as a pub, a factory worker would have no problem introducing himself saying, “I’m a factory worker.” But could you picture a knowledge worker making a similar introduction, saying, “Hi, I’m a knowledge worker”?
Rather, Spira observes, “knowledge workers” are defined by what they are not. But it was also said that “information is the new oil,” so maybe its the right time to be a knowledge worker, whatever it is we do.
