Embracing T-Shaped Skills
I originally heard about the concept of T-shaped skills from Tim Brown at IDEO, most likely from one of his books. To summarize the concept, if you consider a person’s job skills in the shape of a “T”. The vertical line representing the person’s depth of knowledge in their specialized area while the horizontal line represents their ability to work across other disciplines that might not be their specialty. I’ve also heard this defined as “versatilist” as well.
I define the horizontal line as a way to represent the breadth of knowledge someone might have within a particular industry (in related disciplines) not just other separate disciplines. Either view seems to work just fine depending on the context or the team member.
While the example above considers User Experience as the primary skill, the T-shaped skill model is just as applicable for software developers, engineers, marketing specialists, and really anyone within any type of career specialty. The depth of experience for the dominant skill too could be further broken down into sub-skills. In the case of the above example: research, prototyping, and user interviewing would be good examples.
Creativity comes from mixing disciplines
The concept around T-shaped skills is about facilitating collaboration between a team, but I think the importance goes further than that.
For me I’ve found that studying multiple disciplines have helped me step out of the boundaries of my comfort zone to create better products and services for my clients. The goal as I see it isn’t to become one of those beloved full-stack whatevers or a magical unicorn of something either. The goal is adding additional perspective to your specialty.
The old question of “should designers code?” isn’t really the right question. Instead ask, “what else can I learn that brings additional value or perspective to my skillset?”
For example, it’s less important that a designer can write code than it is that they can understand the limitations and context of how their design is applied in the real-world. If that’s learning to code for them, great. But this isn’t a benefit only to the thinking of designers. If you’re a digital marketer, how might learning HTML help you understand your digital campaigns better? Or in reverse, how might understanding more about marketing help you in creating better designs and products?
Regardless of where a person is in their career, widening their scope of understanding can add more tools to their creative thinking toolset.
If you can’t hire for it, inspire and build it
Understanding the need for T-shaped skills is just as important, if not more, for managers to understand. Often when we’re hiring for a new position we’re solely focused on the primary job role and rarely consider the foundational understanding or other indirect disciplines where the candidate is confident.
If you’re hiring developers do what you can to inspire them to learn other languages, to learn programming methodologies, design patterns, and improved conceptual thinking. If you’re hiring marketers, maybe your SEO or social teams could benefit from learning foundation marketing skills outside of their specialty.
Don’t follow the philosophy of “I’m not going to help you learn that because it’s not in your formal job description.” Helping your team learn supporting skills will give them added perspective, help them better perform their job, and improve their performance as team collaborators.
It’s great to specialize, but allow yourself to focus while at the same time being observant and aware of supporting knowledge that can help you grow.
