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Of software designers and broken combs

An interesting way of thinking about skills development that I hadn’t heard of before. Conventional wisdom suggests aiming for a T shaped distribution of skills — (the horizontal bar representing shallow skills across many disciplines; the vertical bar representing deep understanding of one discipline).

The broken comb model suggests developing a moderately deep understanding across many disciplines.

With certain exceptions, organizations with many T-shaped people may have difficulty keeping all of those T-shaped people busy. If the base of my T is icon design, but there are no icons available to design, I am either stuck twiddling my thumbs, or doing something Iā€™m much less good at.

Duncan Stephen

Photo of Duncan Stephen

I lead teams and organisations to make human-centred decisions. I am a lead content designer and information architect at the Scottish Government.

Email — contact@duncanstephen.net

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