As a knowledge worker, your business is to sell your knowledge.  Having the know-how that is in hot demand is paramount to achieving success. Do you know how to check whether your knowledge is aligned with the market needs?  In other words, can you determine your “knowledge market alignment”?

3 Steps to measure your Knowledge Market Alignment

1. Research your knowledge trends  - go to Google Trends ( http://www.google.com/trendsh) and enter the tag(s) that describe your know-how. For instance, in my case I’m a “business process management” expert, and the tag that I will be searching is exactly the same.
   

   The upper line is a measurement of the search volume, while the lower line represents a measure of the number of times that the tag was posted on google news stories.	This represents the location of the activity on the tag captured by google servers.

   Note: make sure you use the right tags to reference your knowledge.  For instance, I usually type BPM as an acronym for “Business Process Management”.  However, BPM is used to reference “beats per minute”, and it’s also a dutch acronym  for a disease.

2. Compare the trend with a RELATED known hot topic - continuing to use Google Trends, enter a known hot topic, that is related to your knowledge. In my case that is “cloud computing”.  It is important that the topics are related because the objective of this step is to allow you to compare trends, so you can have an idea of how the market is evolving.

You can see easily  that could computing is taking the world by storm, and that it is a relative new trend. From a distance, it seems the world is a lot more interested in cloud computing than in Business Process Management.	With no surprise India still ranks high but the United States makes the list in 6th position

3. Check the tag on the monster database - the job market reflects the present and what the market wants. Go to http://monster.com and enter the same tags. Go to the end of the page, and see the number of results

The tag “business process management” returns 180 jobs	The tag “Cloud Computing” returns 92 jobs

Conclusions

1. BPM may have achieved its peak - search volume going down is probably an indication that subject is started to be well known, and that people already acquired the necessary knowledge (no need to search for it). The knowledge of business process management may be at its peak, and its on its way towards commoditization.  This could be confirmed based on India’s huge traffic when compared with the rest of the world.
2. Cloud computing is RED HOT - “Cloud computing” is HOT right now. Jumping on the bandwagon may give you some strategic advantage in the future. If you can’t, it means that you need to start reading and preparing to acquire new skills. Even though there are twice as many jobs in “business process management”, it seems that “cloud computing” is not a fad, and at 92 positions, for such an early topic, may represent a clear shift in the market.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could do this research more frequently? That was one of the many reasons to actively manage your knowledge using the oneCloud Individual Edition.  Stop guessing about the future, and get control of your future!