Generalist or Specialist, why not T-shaped?
As a human who burgeoning, it’s perfectly normal to explore that curiosity as part of personal development. Especially when we are young, it feels amazing to discover new things and experiencing to acquire skills. “Stay hungry, stay foolish”, related to Steve Jobs’ commencement speech in 2005 is appropriate to describe this condition. It’s more like ‘this person’ is never satisfied with just a few achievements and have a proven track record of doing various awesome things. Honestly, it was this person who has dabbled in many skills, rather than gaining expertise by focusing on one.
On the other hand, there are people who work really hard to sharpen only one skill. For example, when you’re a digital marketer, you must have comprehensive knowledge and understanding of digital marketing such as running Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, etc. People call this person an I-shaped person because the vertical line represents the person’s depth of knowledge to expert at one thing.
Then, what is T-shaped person?
Instead of being “jack of all trades, master of none” generalist, or specialised in one thing, a T-shaped person covers an “I-shaped person” and slightly capable in many other general things. They’re should be focused on one specific skill (vertical line) while they trained a lot on the other things (horizontal line). Yes, we would say the alternate phrase of “T-shaped person” is Generalising Specialist.
The T-shaped person is going to do the specialised skill across the board. This means they’re about to create collaboration between the general skills and the specialised skill they have. As the illustration above, T-shaped person is capable to put together a digital marketing strategy that feeds into a machine learning program that feeds into a data analyst strategy. This is what makes T-shaped person more valuable.
Deep Discipline Knowledge and Intellectual Breadth
Based on my experiences, I’ve found that understanding multiple disciplines have helped me go beyond my boundaries to develop a comprehensive knowledge of various subject area, I have the ability to engage with different culture of thought, and the capability to apply my competencies in practice including in multi-disciplinary contexts. And of course, studying various knowledge and understanding the profit from experiences, it will lead us out of our comfort zone.
Become a T-shaped person is all about adding more perspective to our speciality.
In this fast-paced and dynamic era, it’s incredible to be generalist because they are easy to adapt and have some basic various knowledge. That’s why they seem to be attractive to other people.
However, we can’t always only have basic skills. We all know building a personal brand is important to make people feel more comfortable as if they know us. If we don’t have any specific skills or expertise in any path, it means we don’t have a special identity that can be used as personal branding. We just stay in one place or maybe not moving forward because we only have those basic skills.
“I am not going to help them because it is not in my job description.” is the perspective that won’t go anywhere. Instead say, “I can help them perform a better job and improve as team collaborators. And I will earn additional perspective or valuable skill-set from them.”
It doesn’t matter where a person goes in their career, but expanding their scope of understanding can add more value to their creative and innovative thinking toolset. By learning each other’s skills, we also learn each other’s domain-specific language. This helps us communicate more effectively as we have more understanding of different perspectives.
How do we develop T-shaped skills?
Let’s say that developing T-shaped person is not that instant, but it needs a long journey and process. Probably right now you are still in search of who you going to be or don’t have all the required skills most people need. Instead of giving up, let’s have some effort to build the skill-set with only your current existing resources.
- Know your focus area of expertise
— What do I want to become an expert in?
Becoming a T-shaped person needs to start with a basic understanding of where you going to deepen your skills. If you aren’t already an expert, you can start with what major you take in university, hobbies, or things you do frequently. However, this doesn’t mean you need to go get a degree of your expertise, but a broad course or certification that gives you a little bit of everything is a great way to start.
Once you understand your expertise, you can find your weakest point on that skill. For example, you might be a product analyst, but you need to tune-up on your design skills or copywriting skills. So, you go get some courses to get certified skills and competencies. Those skills definitely would stick to your main job description.
2. If you can’t acquire it, build it by yourself
— What can I do to add unique value for myself?
I originally heard about the concept of ‘learn-it-all’ individuals ultimately doing better than ‘know-it-all’ people from CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella. In this case, having a growth mindset is a must. We must be hungry to seek new knowledge and curious about new skill-set, especially in focus area of our expertise.
Strive to have a better understanding of at least the basics of the specialities of other people on ourselves. In addition to studying in our area of expertise, we additionally must be up-to-date on the area of expertise around our work area.
3. Take all projects seriously
— How can people see me as a valuable person?
So, you’re a software engineer but love to paint? Does it matter? Well, I can say definitely it doesn’t matter. Just do it well, you can even use both understandings to create interesting content on software with your painting or create it for NFTs collection, I guess.
What if I say when you’re in a day off and do an incredible painting, then you publish it on an online art gallery. Then there is a rich artist who is interested in your art philosophy and recruits you to join their team as a side job. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have another income from your side project? In the end, take everything we do seriously. We never know when the opportunity will come, right?
What type of skill person do we need to create a perfect team?
Basically, the organization or team still need all skills of the above. The T-shaped skills person can share their experiences and knowledge with those I-shaped skills person. The generalist people can also learn from the progress that happens in the team so they can grow and experience together.
This reminds me of when I was playing PlayerUnknown’s BattleGround back then. There is one team consisting of 4 players who has their respective role. Based on my gameplay, there are sniper, support, carry, and rusher. Each role has to play and do their objectives technically. However, when you’re a support (expertise) and the rest of your allies are dead, you have to adjust your role to win the game. You are adjusted to be a rusher and carry at once (side skills). So that, you can potentially have a chicken dinner for the team.
In the end, actually there is more shape of skills out there that we can develop like Pi-shaped skills, Comb-shaped skills, and X-shaped skills. This is the fast-paced and collaboration era and knows that a lot of people out there trying to reach their best by having hybrid (or more) speciality. Or even the X-shaped people who were born to be the leaders and will lead their team to accomplish the goal by having their credibility in any discipline yet being very professional.
So, which one will you going to be?
This article is also published on my LinkedIn
