ā
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 Iām much less good at.
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
Comments