T-shaped skills

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The concept of T-shaped skills, or T-shaped persons is a metaphor used in job recruitment to describe the abilities of persons in the workforce. The vertical bar on the letter T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one's own.

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The earliest popular reference is by David Guest in 1991. [1] Tim Brown, CEO of the IDEO design consultancy, endorsed this approach to résumé assessment as a method to build interdisciplinary work teams for creative processes. Earlier references can be found; [2] in the 1980s the term "T-shaped man" was used internally by McKinsey & Company for recruiting and developing consultants and partners, both male and female.

The term T-shaped skills is also common in the agile software development world and refers to the need for cross-skilled developers and testers in an agile team, e.g. a scrum team.

Also known as

Skills of various shapes

Other shapes have also been proposed:

Γ- and Μ-shaped individuals (gamma and mu, respectively) have been described by Brittany Fiore in her ethnographic work of data science research communities to indicate people with supporting strengths in computationally- and software-intensive fields. [3] [4]

Similarly, π-shaped skills (after the Greek letter pi) refer to "a broad mastery of general management skills atop a few spikes of deep functional or domain expertise". [5]

See also

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References

  1. "The hunt is on for the Renaissance Man of computing," in The Independent, September 17, 1991.
  2. Johnston, D. L. (1978). Scientists Become Managers-The "T"-Shaped Man. IEEE Engineering Management Review, 6(3), 67–68. doi:10.1109/emr.1978.4306682
  3. Fiore, Brittany. "Community-level data science and its spheres of influence: beyond novelty squared". eScience Institute. Retrieved 31 December 2018.
  4. Schmidt, Sophie C.; Marwick, Ben (28 January 2020). "Tool-Driven Revolutions in Archaeological Science". Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology. 3 (1): 18–32. doi: 10.5334/jcaa.29 .
  5. Michels, David. "Going Pi-Shaped: How To Prepare For The Work Of The Future". Forbes.