Knowledge worker

Knowledge workers are academics, whose job is to "think for a living".

Roles

Knowledge workers bring benefits to organizations in a bracket of ways. These include:

These cognition worker contributions are in contrast with activities that they would typically not be requested to perform, including:

There is a category of transitional tasks which include roles that are seemingly routine, but that require deeper technology, product, or client knowledge to fulfill a function. These include:

Generally, if the knowledge can be retained, knowledge worker contributions will serve to expand the knowledge assets of a company. While it can be unmanageable to measure, this increases the overall service of its intellectual capital. In cases where the knowledge assets draw commercial or monetary value, companies may create patents around their assets, at which segment the material becomes restricted intellectual property. In these knowledge-intensive situations, knowledge workers play a direct, vital role in increasing the financial usefulness of a company. They can do this by finding solutions on how they can find new ways to make profits. This can also be related with market in addition to research. Davenport 2005 says that even whether knowledge workers are not a majority of any workers, they do have the near influence on their economies. He adds that companies with a high volume of knowledge workers are the most successful and fastest growing in leading economies including the United States.

Reinhardt et al.'s 2011 review of current literature shows that the roles of knowledge workers across the workforce are incredibly diverse. In two empirical studies they have "proposed a new way of classifying the roles of knowledge workers and the knowledge actions they perform during their daily work.": 150  The typology of knowledge worker roles suggested by them are "controller, helper, learner, linker, networker, organizer, retriever, sharer, solver, and tracker":: 160