You never stop learning, but you should start teaching

In a learning organisation we are all learners, but over time each individual moves towards being a teacher as well

When an employee is very new to an organisation or to a topic, they are usually quite quiet in KM activities; in lesson capture meetings for example, or on community forums. They are still learning the basics, which they get from training, from the community knowledge base, and they spend 100% of their KM time watching, listening to and reading community discussion. They don’t tend to ask questions  – their questions are still fairly basic, and if they do ask, the answer is usually a version of “read the manual“.

After a bit more time, the employees begin to find that they themselves can answer the questions of others. This can happen relatively quickly as well – I remember interviewing one guy who was less than 2 years into the company, and a question came up on the community forum which was related to a special study he had just completed.  He answered this successfully, and reported how pleased he was to be able to “feed something back” to the CoP.

Remember, once you move out of the lurking phase, your responsibility to learn will begin to evolve into a responsibility to teach as well.