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.