An army of purpose-driven consultants stands at the ready. Should we be doing more to empower them?
What kind of superheroes are we expecting to take on the mission of transforming research into impact?
Professional knowledge mobilizers may need up to 80 different skills to do their job, not including the attitudes and behaviors needed to activate those skills.[1]
As a point of reference, human resources professionals who design job descriptions typically identify somewhere between a handful and a dozen “competencies” per role (skills plus attitudes and behaviors).
This makes me wonder: while calls for capacity building in knowledge mobilization—at both the institutional and personal level—are ambitious, are they realistic?
What if the KMb field took a page from other fields with complex roles and considered ways to share responsibilities among people inside and outside the organization? The quickest way to gain capacity for KMb could be to borrow it, not build it.
Putting KMb capacity-building in perspective
In Canada, the mission to mobilize research knowledge didn’t begin as a grass-roots movement fomented by researchers. It started as a mandate imposed from above, through stipulations baked into federal funding programs for research.
The capacity to support KMb hasn’t, therefore, evolved organically. In many cases, it’s been foisted on institutions as a mandated retrofit.
For the most part, our institutions of higher learning were designed as factories for knowledge production, with no provision for distribution. Now today, they’re expected to ramp up production while also becoming proficient at distribution through multiple channels.
The retrofit solution has been to add a new wing to the knowledge factory by delegating research translation and mobilization to an emerging group of specialized professionals. In many cases, these newcomers have a job title that makes their KMb role explicit. In other situations, KMb is implicit in their other duties as a research manager, clinical research coordinator, and so on.
Many of these professionals have told me that life in the new KMb wing can be lonely and frustrating. Their work is not always recognized, and it’s seldom easy, largely because the typical KMb role is shaped like one of those fabulous multitools that includes a knife, can opener, nail file, corkscrew, bottle opener, pliers, flashlight, and more.
I’m glad to see that recent scholarship has been pointing out the need for skill-building and structural capacity-building to support KMb staff.[2] At the same time, I’m not sure how realistic a project it is to upskill professional knowledge mobilizers if the skillset they’re meant to develop is impossibly large.
As someone who provides training in KMb, I’d love to see budgets for skill-building increase. Yet, looking at the capacity-building issue from a broader perspective, at a system level, I’m not sure that trying to prepare people for impossibly complex roles makes good sense.
Rather than trying to turn professional knowledge mobilizers into multi-tools, what if we enabled them to access multi-skilled talent outside their institution?
What about a “work redesign” approach?
The puzzle of how to fill complex roles is not unique to the KMb field. In industry, organizations are increasingly challenged to fill roles that demand a range of skills it’s tough to find in a single human. For example, the ideal person to serve as a data scientist has sharp technical skills plus business acumen plus people skills. The profile of the perfect job candidate reads like three job descriptions in one.
An innovative solution, as described in a SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) blog from 2020, [3] is to consider all the competencies required to fulfill a role and redistribute them over multiple roles. Some tasks might be eligible for automation. Others could be assigned to interns, contractors, or staff in another part of the organization.
This flexible approach focuses on the workflow, not the number of FTEs (full-time employees). It acknowledges the importance of upskilling while leveraging workers who are already skilled.
To apply this approach to KMb, the first step is to recognize that KMb skills are not new. Despite the rhetoric of novelty that pervades KMb scholarship and practice, different occupations have been using KMb competencies for years. Technical writers, for instance, have been translating highly advanced information and data into documents for lay people. So have marketers working with technology- and science-driven companies. And consultants in various fields have been collaborating effectively with partners and participants to facilitate uptake of bold new ideas, many of them research-based.
In recent years, we’ve witnessed a wave of purpose-driven consultants start and join firms across various industries. This active group possesses skills and values that align well with the KMb movement. Should the research community, and those of us who support it, be doing more to leverage them?
Thinking beyond outsourcing
I can already hear the protests that consultants are too expensive, and that’s true if we think only in terms of a work-for-hire relationship. But that would be a short-term solution, and we know that KMb is a long game.
A more sustainable solution could be for the research community to help improve research literacy and research access among consulting practitioners. This highly skilled, highly motivated population could join the ranks of professional mobilizers as a supportive militia, ready for action.
The best consultants (and this is the talent pool I’m talking about) already have much of what it takes to move knowledge from concept into practice. The 2017 article that lists 80 discrete knowledge translation (KT) skills divides those into 11 competency categories. An experienced consultant is likely to have mastered nine of those:
- Change management
- Communication
- Creating, sourcing and synthesizing knowledge
- Evaluating impact
- Facilitating and negotiating
- Leading and managing the process of turning knowledge into outcomes
- Managing partnerships and relationships
- Networking and engaging community
- Understanding, creating, and using KT tools, products, and practices
Depending on their specialty field, some consultants will also be skilled in the two remaining competencies: training and capacity building, and managing legal issues and IP.
As someone who has spent seven years training consultants in a global firm, what strikes me about all the so-called KT competencies is that they take a long time to develop. Consultants have put in the work required to develop expertise, through thousands (or tens of thousands) of hours of intense project work involving a broad range of parties.[4]
In contrast, the major skill deficit of consultants—research literacy—is easier and less time-consuming to cultivate. These days, many consultants have at least a Master’s degree, so they have had some exposure to the way scholarship works. They should be familiar, for example, with the conventions of academic discourse and with at least some research methodologies. While they may not apply the standards of “academic rigor” in all their projects, they know what that phrase means and grasp its value.
As I often say, “We’re not mobilizing knowledge; we’re mobilizing people.” To solve the capacity-building issues hindering KMb, perhaps we should be doing more to empower the “gray literature” crowd. (“Gray literature” is literature that’s loosely based on scholarly research but is not peer-reviewed, e.g., reports produced by consulting firms.)
A case study in leveraging critical competencies
About 15 years ago, I experienced first-hand the value of building on established core competencies rather than trying to develop those around other skills and experience. I had to argue with my boss to pursue this approach, which seemed counter-intuitive to him, but my method enabled us to quickly scale a program that might otherwise have faltered.
The challenge was to expand a pilot writing program, at least doubling the number of participants. For the pilot, I had done all the teaching and marking. Going forward, I’d need a small team of trainers and markers.
Since the subject was business writing, I was encouraged to seek out someone with an MBA, someone who’d get the context in which learners were writing. At a gut level, that recruitment strategy didn’t make sense to me, so I sought advice from a previous mentor.
For many years, this mentor had been running a successful university writing program for engineering students. His squad of teaching assistants co-marked writing assignments in engineering classes, collaborating with engineering instructors.
At first, he’d tried this innovative approach by training engineering students to give feedback on writing. Then he’d quickly pivoted and decided to hire markers with strong writing skills (usually grad students studying literature or rhetoric and composition). He advised me to do the same. It would be much more effective, he told me, to familiarize English students with engineering topics than it would be to train engineering students to grasp the nuances of written expression.
Although my mentor didn’t use the term, he’d recognized the value of “transferable skills.” The English students came with a critical set of skills, honed through years of close reading and essay writing, they could easily apply in a new context. The engineering students, on the other hand, came with a narrow set of skills, based on subject-matter knowledge, that didn’t set them up to evaluate the expression of technical knowledge, even within their domain.
I persuaded my boss to let me follow my mentor’s advice, and we assembled a small team of markers, all of whom had a Master’s degree in English. For the most part, they’d worked as professional writers, writing instructors, or editors.
While this group didn’t have experience using performance-based assessment to evaluate writing, they had the core skills, the critical competencies, needed to learn this method. With consistent coaching from me, and practice sessions to “normalize” assessment scores, we were able to smoothly scale up the writing program. This initial growth then paved the way to expand further, and under my leadership, the single pilot course developed into a five-level program.
Following this same logic, the KMb movement might move more knowledge, faster by engaging people who come with pre-existing skills in areas such as leadership, networking, facilitation, and evaluation. These consulting skills, I’d argue, form the core of the pragmatic skillset needed to build relationships and share research knowledge in ways that drive practical results.
This is not to say we should stop developing the skills of professional knowledge mobilizers or of graduate students. Graduate students, in particular, deserve training opportunities because they’ll form the next generation of impact-minded researchers. While we enhance the skills of those in official KMb roles, we could do more to facilitate KMb among consultants who are unofficially doing KMb and could do more with more knowledge.
Some concrete ideas for partnering with consultants
Two barriers currently prevent consultants from participating fully in the KMb movement: lack of research literacy and lack of access. Here are a few ideas for tackling these gaps.
Lack of access to scholarly research
Open access journals are enabling knowledge users outside the academy to read some scholarly publications, but what’s available outside university databases is just a sliver of any body of knowledge. Much more could be done to enable a free flow of information from the research community to people who are bringing innovative solutions to businesses, healthcare organizations, not-for-profits, and community groups. Here are a couple questions that could be worth exploring:
- Are there opportunities for students to do work-based learning placements with consulting firms (as they typically do with not-for-profits)?
Experiential learning can be a powerful vehicle for KMb. During my time as an experiential learning practitioner, I noticed, however, that many experiential learning programs assume that “not-for-profit” should be the default type of “community partner.”
Outside the co-op stream, there are plenty of opportunities for students to share their knowledge, and not all of those are in the public sector. In fact, those situations most conducive to rapid knowledge transfer may exist in the faster-paced world of the private sector, especially in consulting firms (of all sizes and in a wide variety of industry sectors).
- Could universities provide a community-facing Office of Research Services offering for-fee assistance with research?
Such an office could give students valuable work experience and opportunities to connect their field of study with “the real world,” reinforcing the value of their education. It could also establish a revenue stream for the university, offsetting the precipitous drop in tuition income that many institutions are facing.
Lack of research literacy
More than 10 years ago, I served for a short time as Writing Centre Coordinator at a small university. As part of my job, I delivered guest lectures, across multiple disciplines, to introduce students to the intricacies of scholarly discourse.
Within the space of an hour-long class, I enabled undergraduates to get past fixating on using the right citation style and avoiding plagiarism. Within that short time, I helped them appreciate scholarship as a kind of conversation among experts, governed by a special set of conventions.
If that much can be quickly achieved with undergraduates, just imagine what could be accomplished with a group of seasoned consultants. A research literacy workshop (or series of workshops) for consultants could equip them to:
- Identify the practices and standards that define “academic rigor”
- Refine their search skills
- Use AI ethically as part of the research process
- Differentiate among different kinds of literature reviews
- Describe various research methodologies used in various disciplines
- Assess the quality of a research study by evaluating the methodology (quantitative or qualitative)
- Develop and pursue research questions that counter their hypothesis
- Distinguish between paraphrasing and quoting and how to use both ways of integrating research into a document and presentation
- Adapt citation styles to the real-world context
- Develop a network of research partners
The last bullet above is perhaps the most significant. When we think about building networks to support KMb, we tend to assume that those webs spin out from the research community. We could do more to encourage potential partners outside that community to reach inward.
Collaboration could spark acceleration
The world of research and the world of consulting are two different realms, and I’m not suggesting we should combine them. Nonetheless, as the term "gray lit” reminds us, the edges of the two worlds also shade into one another. In my experience working with academics and with consultants from various fields, the gray zone is often home to professionals with a shared desire to transform evidence into impact.
What if the KMb movement intentionally recruited partners from the borderland where consulting and research intersect--partners able to bring strong networks, critical competencies, and a missional drive?
How could we accelerate research translation not just by training up knowledge mobilizers within the research community but also by tapping into the vast talent pool of potential mobilizers operating outside it?
In my daily work as a knowledge mobilization consultant, I move among diverse organizations connected with research. Outside the walls of publicly funded institutions, I see a consulting militia with boots-on-the-ground experience. They appear to be ready, willing, and eager to serve.
The next frontier in building capacity for KMb could be venturing into the gray zone to recruit and empower these potential allies.
If you’d like to work on practical solutions to help mobilize knowledge mobilizers outside the research community, let’s get together to brainstorm!
[1] Bayley, J. et al. (2017). Development of a framework for knowledge mobilization and impact competencies. Evidence and Policy. Author’s post-print version retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319647942_Development_of_a_framework_for_knowledge_mobilisation_and_impact_competencies.
It's not clear whether the 80-item competency framework presented in this article applies at the ecosystem, institutional, or individual level. However, the framework evolved out of “a discussion on human resources for knowledge mobilization,” which recognized “the need to identify knowledge broker competencies as a preliminary step to developing capacity for these [KMb] roles.”
Since many individuals in KMb roles carry much of the responsibility for KMb at their institution, in practice, a professional knowledge mobilizer is expected to possess many if not most of the 80 different skills required for KMb.
[2] One recent example is this Canadian case study: Golhasany, H., & Harvey, B. (2025). Navigating barriers and pathways in capacity development for knowledge mobilization: Perspectives from McGill University’s Faculty of Education. Frontiers in Education 10, pp. 1-14.
[3] Zielinski, D. (2020, August 4). Consider work redesign to close talent gaps. SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/consider-work-redesign-to-close-talent-gaps
[4] I’ve recently been called out on using the term “stakeholder,” which can be viewed as a holdover from colonial times, so I’ve started using phrases such as “interested parties” or “partners” instead. Cynthia Lockrey provides a list of other alternatives. See her online article (n.d.) Why you need to stop using stakeholder (and what to say instead). Lockrey Communications. https://lockreycommunications.com/why-you-need-to-stop-using-stakeholder-and-what-to-say-instead/
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