Research On The Knowledge Amount Required In Technical Positions

Knowledge work productivity was regarded by Peter Drucker as the biggest challenge in the 21st century and the determinant element of a country's competitive advantage in the future. But until now, the research on this problem has just started;the understanding of the regulation is placed in the very hazy stage and far away from a set of integrated theories. In this research, we performed some empirical study on some fundamentally theoretical problems of this field. First, this study provides a new way to define knowledge work, trying to distinguish knowledge work from other forms of work. Second, this study identifies the methods to measure the amount of knowledge required in different positions. Also, this study explores some characteristics of knowledge works.Knowledge work seems before we know it, but it is a relatively new area of research and a slippery and woolly concept. However, from the prospective to make knowledge works more productive, we proposed that process standardization is an important factor to define knowledge works. If the working processes can be standardized, this kind of work will no longer fall within the category of knowledge work. This standardization process means that a set of actions necessary for doing this work has reached the consensus and proved to be efficient, and that the objective and requirement of this work has been accessible and available. If so, the big process variation of modern-day's knowledge work means that the ultimate law of this work is still beyond our understanding.This new definition also supported that there are no absolute knowledge works or manual works. (Jennifer Yau et al. 2003). It would be useful to classify 'strong' knowledge works, i.e. those constantly and deliberately use knowledge in their working processes, and 'weak' knowledge works, i.e. those use sparse knowledge in their working processes. Along this continuum lie all kinds of knowledge works. Therefore, one of the major challenges regarding this new definition is to distinguish the amount of knowledge required in different knowledge works.