Knowledge worker

Examples include ICT professionals, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living".

[5] They are also often displaced from their bosses, working in various departments and time zones or from remote sites such as home offices and airport lounges.

[6] As businesses increase their dependence on information technology, the number of fields in which knowledge workers must operate has expanded dramatically.

As with the other roles, a creative worker in software programming requires team working and interpersonal skills in order to communicate effectively with those from other disciplinary backgrounds and training.

As regards the managerial roles of creative directing and systems programme managing, the abilities to create a vision for the job in hand, to convince, strategize, execute, and plan towards the eventual completion of the given task (such as a campaign or a software) are necessary capacities (Loo, 2017).

These are related to disciplines such as those from the humanities (e.g., literature), and the creative arts such as painting and music (e.g., popular and classical varieties).

However, the degree of technical expertise may be less for a programme manager, as only knowledge of the relevant software language is necessary to understand the issues for communicating with the team of developers and testers.

Within this role, creative knowledge workers may perform their activities individually and/or collectively as part of their contribution to the project.

The findings also brought out some characteristics of collaborative working such as the varieties of stakeholders such as sub-contracted groups, and the indirect relationships between clients, workers (of an ad agency), and consumers (Loo, 2017).

"[14] Paul Alfred Weiss (1960)[15] said that "knowledge grows like organisms, with data serving as food to be assimilated rather than merely stored".

[1]: 4  "According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (1981), by the beginning of the 1970s around 40 percent of the working population in the USA and Canada were classified to the information sector, whereas in most other OECD countries the figures were still considerably lower.

[18] Tapscott (2006) sees a strong, on-going linkage between knowledge workers and innovation, but the pace and manner of interaction have become more advanced.

While he echoes concern over copyright and intellectual property law being challenged in the marketplace, he feels strongly that businesses must engage in collaboration to survive.

He notes that effective and efficient knowledge work relies on the smooth navigation of unstructured processes and the elaboration of custom and one-off procedures.

"As we move to the 21st century business model, the focus must be on equipping knowledge workers with tools and infrastructure that enable communication and information sharing, such as networking, e-mail, content management and increasingly, social media."

Due to the rapid global expansion of information-based transactions and interactions being conducted via the Internet, there has been an ever-increasing demand for a workforce that is capable of performing these activities.

To that end, the public education and community college systems have become increasingly focused on lifelong learning to ensure students receive skills necessary to be productive knowledge workers in the 21st century.

In these knowledge-intensive situations, knowledge workers play a direct, vital role in increasing the financial value of a company.

[1] He adds that companies with a high volume of knowledge workers are the most successful and fastest growing in leading economies including the United States.

Reinhardt et al.'s (2011) review of current literature shows that the roles of knowledge workers across the workforce are incredibly diverse.

The hierarchy ranges from the effort of individual specialists, through technical activity, professional projects, and management programs, to organizational strategy, knowledge markets, and global-scale networking.

With the last type of creative working, it may include aspects such as the culture of 'good practice' in technical problem-solving and the 'power of expression' in software programming.

This approach is different from that taken by Zuboff (1988), Drucker (1993), Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) and Reich (2001) who sought to provide a more generic understanding (Loo, 2017).

Based on the findings, information, communications and electronic technologies (ICET) are viewed as an organisational tool, a source of ideas (such as the Internet), and a way of modelling a concept.

ICET enables workers to spend more time on advanced activities, which leads to the intensification of creative applications.