The T-Shaped Engineer
The first “official” reference to T-shaped skills, or a T-shaped person, was made by David Guest back in 1991. The concept gained real popularity after the CEO of IDEO Design Consultancy firm –?Tim Brown?– endorsed the idea when looking over applicants’ resumes. Brown’s idea? Using the search for T-shaped skills/a T-shaped person helps build the very best interdisciplinary teams within a company. It, in turn, leads to a stronger, more efficient and potentially groundbreaking company. However, historically speaking, the term T-shaped man can be dated back to the 1980s.
At that time, McKinsey & Company used the term widely on internal documents and publications that were seen primarily by upper management. The term was referring to the idea that the T-shaped man (which also included women by that point) was ideal for recruitment as an employee and should also be looked for in terms of the consultants and partners the company decided to work with. The evolution of it started as an I-shaped, T-Shaped, Pi-Shaped and comb-shaped.
Generalist, “A jack of all trades, but a master of none”. If you decide to go the path of the generalist your skills will grow horizontally. You will enjoy learning new concepts and will be able to satisfy your curiosity by working with different tools and languages. However, mastering anything will be hard. In order to become proficient with a technology you need to dedicate massive amounts of time to it. A generalist focuses on multiple things at once, so their attention is split up. In recent years, being called a jack of all trades has a slight negative connotation. Generalists cover a lot of area in their skills but many remain on the surface. Often, when challenging work needs to be done - engineers with deeper knowledge are needed.
Specialists devote their time and work to a narrow set of technologies and tools. They sacrifice the joy of exploring multiple disciplines by dedicating their time and efforts towards one area. That way they may lack knowledge beyond the fundamentals in supporting areas but become masters at what they do. Many developers are in this field because of the challenge. They like solving puzzles and untangling complex problems. It is often the specialists which are tasked with the most difficult but rewarding solutions.
Their mastery gives them insight that other developers lack.
Devoting all your time in one language, stack or technology can be limiting, though. If you decide to go the specialist route, you need to consider what investment will pay off the best in the long term.
In this article, I like to focus on the T-Shaped skills for an engineer. I won't be going to the specialist part, I am focusing on the "Generalist skills" that I think each engineer regardless of their role will need.
T-Shaped Engineer Competencies & Maturity Assessment
In this article, I will be sharing my view of how to become a T-Shaped Engineer with specific skills and some recommendations of how to achieve it and how to measure it (some of my measurement learning is coming from PluralSight).
These are 12 list of competencies that can help any engineer to become a T-Shaped person. You can assess your skills in three levels like PluralSight:
These are the details of each competency and resources and topics that I think worth knowing and learning.
1. Finance
I believe it is important to have a good understanding of finance and accounting, topics like CoA, Financial Statements and similar matters. These are the sources that I think very highly of them.
2. Leadership
This is an endless topic. The more I have learned, the more I have ever lacked. A fundamental step is probably improving your self-awareness and accept yourself.
Coaching:
Other leadership related topics:
Knowledge Worker leadership:
3. Agile
4. Business Outcome
5. DevSecOps
领英推荐
6. aws
7. Strategy
8. Vision & Roadmapping
9. Product Delivery
Innovation Topic:
Habit Topic:
10. Quality Assurance
11. Data Fluency
12. Experience Design
Employee Experience:
CEO at Sharkware, Senior Software/Android Engineer
2 年https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334234605_T-shaped_engineers_getting_ready_for_employability/link/5d1ec370458515c11c12922c/download
II Decades of delivering software engineering as a service #saas_development #ai #iot Serial Entrepreneur | Best Alumni Benelux Vietnam 2016 & EuroCham Vietnam 2018
3 年Trinh Dang
AWS | Pega | GCC | Alum: J P Morgan, BNY Mellon, American Express, Capgemini, Virtusa | Social Investor at Rang De
3 年Going on to M shaped engineer.