Knowledge Management Specialist
What this job does:
Organizes, curates, and shares an organization's scientific knowledge—including research data, publications, SOPs, and institutional expertise—so that R&D, regulatory affairs, and medical affairs teams can access the right information when they need it. Maintains knowledge repositories and databases, captures insights from subject-matter experts and codifies them into accessible formats, designs taxonomies for classifying scientific content, and trains colleagues on KM tools and best practices.
This job is similar to these lab/research tasks:
Literature review and synthesis, writing review articles and grant background sections, maintaining lab notebooks and protocols, mentoring and training junior lab members, organizing references with tools like Mendeley or Zotero
Typical starting salary range
$85k to $140k
Salary estimate represented as 25th to 75th percentile. Gathered from recent job postings, Glassdoor.com, and Salary.com
Daily task breakdown
- Curating, organizing, and maintaining knowledge repositories (databases, wikis, document-management systems) (30%)
- Synthesizing and summarizing scientific/organizational knowledge (reviewing literature, creating best-practice documents) (25%)
- Facilitating knowledge sharing across teams (communities of practice, expert-knowledge capture, cross-functional transfer) (20%)
- Developing KM strategy, tools, and training (designing taxonomies, implementing platforms, training employees) (15%)
- Other: tracking KPIs, stakeholder meetings, project management, admin (10%)
Skills you'll use in this job:
Scientific literature searching and appraisal; information architecture and taxonomy/ontology design; database and content management (SharePoint, Confluence, Veeva Vault); data analysis and visualization; technical writing; document management and version control; project management; critical thinking; written and verbal communication; cross-functional collaboration; training and facilitation; change management; stakeholder engagement; regulatory awareness (ICH, GxP); strategic thinking
Talk about these PhD skills in your resume and interview:
Talk about your literature review and synthesis experience (maps directly to curating and summarizing knowledge), writing review articles and grant background sections (organizing complex science into structured narratives), maintaining lab notebooks and protocols (parallels maintaining repositories), mentoring and training junior lab members (mirrors knowledge-transfer facilitation), and organizing references with tools like Mendeley or Zotero (analogous to taxonomy design).
Alternative job titles to search:
Knowledge Manager; Scientific Knowledge Manager; Knowledge Management Analyst; Knowledge Management Consultant; Information Manager; Scientific Information Specialist; Research Knowledge Specialist; Knowledge Lead; Knowledge Operations Specialist; Scientific Content Manager; Knowledge Engineer
*Note:
-Job titles are inconsistent between companies. Try various keywords.
-PhDs tend to undershoot seniority level. Target higher than you think.
