The following is a guest blog posting from YorkU 4th year undergraduate student Andrei Sedoff. Andrei has worked in the YorkU KM Unit for the past 2 summers and throughout the academic year and has worked on the development of our clear language research summaries, which can be found on our web site here.
Andrei Sedoff
Being part of the KM Unit at York has been a profound learning experience for me. I have many important lessons from KM to take with me into the working world. KM is much more than just an acronym that you find difficult to describe to friends and family (a common question from friends is: “you do what to knowledge?”). It is a powerful toolkit for engaging knowledge in today’s plugged-in workplace. KM creates the space where we can pause and reflect on the meaning of all the information we are constantly bombarded with. This adds value to all the volume. I look forward to applying the concepts I learned from my work with the KM Unit after graduating. It is still unclear to me exactly where I want to build my career, but I aspire to work in international affairs. I feel that the multifaceted nature of KM is a good fit with wanting to have the world as your workplace. I think that any job that deals with international matters embodies the values practiced in KM, especially the focus on collaboration.
No global task may be successfully tackled by any one individual. Seeing problems through the KM lens has always encouraged me to partner with as many people as possible when tackling a challenge. I also think that my experience with KM’s unyielding desire to find innovative solutions will carry over into my future career. I want to apply the KM mindset to look at a problem from multiple angles and be unafraid to try a new approach. Most importantly, I feel that the KM approach has really helped me be able to simply pause and reflect. With the modern supercharged pace of any workplace, reflection is a precious luxury. I hope that I can preserve this feature in my future jobs. I am also really excited to have the opportunity to promote KM outside of York. While working for the KM Unit at York, I have met many of our community, research, and government partners. Virtually everyone I have met has been an enthusiastic ambassador for the KM model. I am excited to promote this model to colleagues in any future workplace.