Personal Knowledge Management: Competitive Competency of Knowledge Workers

Dynamic and complex circumstances of any organization, especially educational organizations critically require creative and innovative knowledge workers. Various skills such as personal knowledge management (PKM) are necessary to succeed in job and professional career. PKM is one of the best sources of personal, collective, and organizational innovations and proper direction of organizational knowledge system. Most of studies are about organizational knowledge management and disregard PKM as basic element of organizational systems. Therefore, this paper tries to introduce PKM concept, approach, models and skills. After that, it will discuss the role of PKM to achieve personal and organizational excellence. Personal knowledge management is a conceptual framework to organize and synthesize personal information. It helps people to absorb essential knowledge and make aware of lifelong learning. PKM make a study foundation for personal knowledge ability progress, and, it finally increases professional skills and competitive advantage. A survey research method was applied to conduct the study. A simple random sample of 97 managers in Shiraz University participated in the study by responding to PKM questionnaire. The validity of the questionnaire was tested and verified. Results showed that Shiraz University managers had average level of personal knowledge management.