The concept of T-shaped skills, or T-shaped persons is a

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide, or obscure, clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are usually meant to cr ...

used in job

recruitment Recruitment is #Process, the overall process of identifying, sourcing, screening, shortlisting, and interviewing candidates for Job (role), jobs (either permanent or temporary) within an organization. Recruitment also is the process involved in ...

to describe the abilities of persons in the

workforce In macroeconomics, the workforce or labour force is the sum of people either working (i.e., the employed) or looking for work (i.e., the unemployed): \text = \text + \text Those neither working in the marketplace nor looking for work are out ...

. 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. The earliest popular reference is by David Guest in 1991. Tim Brown, CEO of the

IDEO IDEO () is a design firm, design and consulting firm with offices in the U.S., England, and China. It was founded in Palo Alto, California, in 1991. The company's 500 staff uses a design thinking approach to design products, services, environmen ...

design consultancy, endorsed this approach to résumé assessment as a method to build

interdisciplinary Interdisciplinarity or interdisciplinary studies involves the combination of multiple academic disciplines into one activity (e.g., a research project). It draws knowledge from several fields such as sociology, anthropology, psychology, economi ...

work teams for creative processes. Earlier references can be found; in the 1980s the term "T-shaped man" was used internally by

McKinsey & Company McKinsey & Company (informally McKinsey or McK) is an American multinational strategy and management consulting firm that offers professional services to corporations, governments, and other organizations. Founded in 1926 by James O. McKinse ...

for recruiting and developing consultants and partners, both male and female. The term T-shaped skills is also common in the

agile software development Agile software development is an umbrella term for approaches to software development, developing software that reflect the values and principles agreed upon by ''The Agile Alliance'', a group of 17 software practitioners, in 2001. As documented ...

world and refers to the need for cross-skilled developers and testers in an agile team, e.g. a scrum team.

Also known as

* Versatilist * Generalizing specialist * Technical craftsperson * Renaissance developer * Master generalist

Skills of various shapes

Other shapes have also been proposed: * X-shaped for leadership * I-shaped for individual depth-skill without communication skills * tree-shaped for a person with depth in many areas or branches of a field Γ- and Μ-shaped individuals (

gamma Gamma (; uppercase , lowercase ; ) is the third letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 3. In Ancient Greek, the letter gamma represented a voiced velar stop . In Modern Greek, this letter normally repr ...

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. 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".

References

External links

T-shaped
Human resource management {{business-stub

Also known as

Skills of various shapes

See also

References

External links