T-Shaped Professional: Software Engineer
As part of a module delivered by University of Limerick, I have been considering what makes a T-Shaped professional. In short, a T-Shaped professional is someone who has developed skills beyond their core expertise that will help them to work with colleagues and professionals with another skillset from their own.
As shown in the diagram, the vertical part of the T-Shape represents a person’s core expertise. For a software engineer, this is their core programming skills such as their development language and the development tools they use.
The horizontal part of the T-Shape represents to other skills a software engineer possess that help them work more effectively with people from other domains. Examples of these skills include;
- Empathy: the ability to understand or feel what someone else is going through and put yourself in their shoes
- Resilience: having the mentality to recover from a difficult situation quickly and remain level-headed. this is vital in a changing environment
- Curiosity: a drive to investigate and understand things that you are not familiar with
- Bridge Building: the ability to find common ground with people and get people to work together to deliver
- Systems Thinking: taking a wide-angle view of a problem where the whole picture is considered, and any interconnected items are considered and never siloed
These skills are essential when you want to work with people outside of your core expertise as they give you the ability to think more broadly and find common ground upon which you can develop ideas cooperatively. This is very important in the software engineering domain as hearing opinions from a broader array of perspectives can lead to the development of a much more complete solution to a problem.
Becoming a T-Shaped professional does take effort and focus but it is very important to develop these skills to work more effectively in complex organisations. Gaining an understanding of what makes a T-Shaped professional has been very valuable learning that I will certainly take forward with me in my career.
