Overview

Your knowledge and skills are your greatest assets. Are you making the most of them? Are you using them to fulfil your ambitions, while leading a balanced lifestyle and avoiding overwork and undue stress? In today's dynamic environment, where the future is uncertain and job security minimal, those who survive and thrive will be those who take charge of their career. They will understand their capabilities, chart a course for their future, work smarter not harder, and network extensively to achieve their aims. In short, they will be knowledge networkers.

This chapter considers what you as an individual need to do to succeed in a networked knowledge world. Your starting point is knowing more about yourself - your values and what is important to you. You then need to consider how to manage your key activities and resources - work, time, communications, information, your network, technology and your workspace. Last, but not least, you need to focus on managing and developing your intellectual capital.

It is not the intent of this chapter to be a primer on personal development, self-improvement or career planning. There are many books that do that much better. ^[1] The main focus is on those aspects that are inherently different in the networked knowledge economy - virtual working and working with information and knowledge as core resources.