Abstract:

Corporate Community Managers provide a substantial contribution to corporates’ internal online knowledge sharing and learning communities. Their range of tasks include the responsibility for planning, formation, operation, growth, and success of communities. Their primary objective is to gain sustainable added corporate values in these communities through co-creation and collaboration. Their support is clearly focused on encouraging proactive participation and fostering communication.

The job profiles of corporate community managers are characterised on the one hand by a broad spectrum of requirements combining social, technical and organisational support, which has not been supported by vocational training and study courses so far and thus favours lateral entrants, and on the other hand by the organic growth of communities in companies, which calls for a complementary qualification of the employees who manage them. This requires qualification offers in the form of specific micro qualification modules instead of large classical training or rigid study modules, which allow the creation of individualised, flexible further training measures with consideration of the respective individual and organisational framework conditions.

However, it is very difficult for potential corporate community managers to find guidance for the development of necessary competencies because of the lack of standardized and scientifically based qualification frameworks and competency profiles.

This paper is part of a design-based research project which aims on the creation of a guided platform for competence development for the qualification of corporate community managers as artefact. In this project, an online platform will be created, which allows a matching between personal and ideal competencies of corporate community managers on the basis of anchor examples. Subsequently, existing qualification gaps will be identified. In a next step, concrete, scientifically profound recommendations for the development of these competencies will be given. Finally, the platform should also be opened for commercial providers of qualification measures who can classify their qualification offers on the basis of the same anchor examples. The platform also gives them the opportunity to develop new programs for the identified competence levels as micro modules. Similar to customer reviews, participants will then be able to assess the extent to which the measure has contributed to the development of competence.

This paper is preceded by a comprehensive quantitative preliminary study in which the requirement profiles of corporate community managers were exploratively determined through qualitative interviews. In order to sharpen the explorative results, three in-depth interviews were conducted with experts, who are responsible for the management of international communities in large corporations as well as for the qualification of corporate community managers and evaluated by content analysis. Access to the interview partners was provided by the German Federal Association of Community Management.

As results, ideal typical competencies are presented and anchor examples are formulated for them, which provide the decisive basis for the iterative development of an innovative platform for guided competence development.

Keywords:

Corporate Community Managers, Competence Development, Vocational Education, Micro Modules, Training on the job.