Developing T-shaped knowledge and skills

By Brian Kreissl

HR has always been a bit of an anomaly given that being an HR generalist was often considered the best way to get ahead. Unlike other professions such as law or medicine, the idea was that having a solid generalist background would position an HR practitioner for a solid career in HR with a holistic understanding of the entire human resources function and a more strategic understanding of the entire business.

Nevertheless, I believe that might be starting to change to a certain extent. Like everything else in the business world, HR is becoming more complex. Similar to professions like law and medicine, it is becoming pretty much impossible for one person to know everything there is to know about HR.

Human resources is a complex field with an ever-expanding body of knowledge and an increasing degree of sophistication. While there will always be demand for people with generalist knowledge, employers in general are increasingly demanding specialists for many roles – including in HR.

The HR function is itself a specialty within the field of business administration and isn’t the same thing as general management. So, in that sense, even an HR generalist is a specialist in HR.

It also appears that certain disciplines seem to be more commonly required of an HR generalist, and some so-called “generalist” roles are really specialist positions. For example, a lot of HR generalists seem to do quite a bit of employee relations type work or are quite heavily involved in recruitment and learning and development.

There are obviously differences in how HR departments are structured in large and small organizations, with highly specialized roles in HR generally concentrated in larger companies and generalists generally in smaller organizations. Of course, many larger organizations have also implemented some form of the business partner model, with corporate HR consisting mostly of specialists and generalists aligned to specific lines of business and being responsible for implementation of programs developed by corporate HR.

But aside from whether one is an HR generalist who wears many hats or a specialist dealing with a very narrow area of HR, I believe it is a good idea to develop both specialist and generalist knowledge and skills for one’s career. This applies both within and beyond the HR function, and has implications for career planning and learning and development throughout the entire organization (and not just for HR practitioners).

Building T-shaped knowledge and expertise

One of the most helpful models I have come across lately is the notion of T-shaped skills, with the horizontal bar of the “T” representing breadth and knowledge outside one’s discipline and the vertical bar representing depth or knowledge and skills in a particular area or specialty. The idea is to have several specialties or areas of expertise, while also having broad generalist knowledge and skills that allow one to collaborate with experts in other areas.

Apparently, this model was originally developed by David Guest back in 1991 and popularized by Tim Brown, CEO of design firm IDEO. According to the UK-based online HR magazine HRZone, Brown used this model to describe the type of candidates he wanted to have work for his organization. 

I think this is a great model to follow for one’s career, and I recently used it to do some planning about my own knowledge, skills and competencies and how I plan to acquire, develop and leverage them in my job and career. However, I actually took the exercise a little further by considering not only work-related skills and competencies, but also the types of hobbies and interests I would like to pursue (several of which are skills-based and could be partially work-related).

I planned this out by creating a T-shaped table in MS Word and including boxes in the vertical and horizontal bars. For the vertical bar, I included the types of knowledge, skills and expertise I am known for or would like to be known for in my career. The horizontal bar included some important secondary knowledge and skills I would like to develop.

I believe completing an exercise like this helps to take an inventory not only of where one is in her career, but also what people need to do to get to the next step. After creating such an inventory, the next step is to develop action plans around these skills – something I will cover next week.