The document discusses and provides examples of T-shaped professionals from various sources on the internet. A T-shaped professional has both depth of knowledge in their primary field or discipline (represented by the vertical line of the T) as well as breadth of working knowledge across multiple disciplines (represented by the horizontal top of the T). Examples provided discuss T-shaped skills in fields like IT, user experience design, marketing, and digital forensics. Some sources also introduce concepts of I-shaped, V-shaped, and versatilist professionals and their skills.

2. Links to related articles
• Beware: the ‘versatilists’ are taking over IT
• Versatilist = the BRM
• Beyond the T-shaped person; becoming star shaped
• Why T-shaped people? - some nice graphics here
• How to develop T-shaped people
• Generalizing Specialists: Improving Your IT Career Skills
• On being T shaped
• Tetris and the Highly Skilled Team
• T-shaped professionals, T-shaped skills, hybrid managers
• Interdisciplinary is not multidisciplinary
• Specialist, Generalist, Versatilist

3. https://letslearnabout.net/blog/
what-it-is-a-t-shaped-developer-
and-why-you-should-be-one/
In this example the horizontal line is a
combination of knowledge and doing
activities.
“understands” versus “creates” and
“performs” “In this case, a tester knows everything has to know to perform the job, but also
understands UX design, can create unit tests, can perform basic DevOps
operations, etc.” extract from the web page

4. I-Shaped, T-Shaped, and now V-Shaped! What
are we Talking About?
• Whatever conference you go to these days there is always someone talking about I-Shaped and T-
Shaped, and I’m now talking about V-Shaped. What are we talking about?
• Of course, we are talking about People. Seriously!
• “Dash”-shaped people are those with some knowledge and skill across multiple disciplines, but no
particular depth of knowledge or skill in any one – the so-called “jack of all trades, master of none”.
• I-Shaped people are those that have grown and developed good depth of knowledge and skill in a
single discipline. But they have little or no knowledge or skill outside of that discipline.
• T-Shaped people, the topic at most Agile conferences today are those that have good depth of
knowledge and skill in one-discipline, as well as reasonable breadth of knowledge and skill across
multiple disciplines.
• V-shaped people is where I believe that we are heading. They have a little knowledge and skill in
one discipline when they start out working.
• Where V-Shaped people are different to T-Shaped people is that, as they grow in knowledge and
skill, they grow in spiral fashion both horizontally and vertically.
• V-Shaped people are the kind that we need for the New Way of Working – so, focus careers and
competency development both across and up and grow your tomorrow’s workforce.
• https://www.talentalign.com/i-shaped-t-shaped-and-now-v-shaped-what-are-we-talking-about/

5. Introduction to Digital Forensics and
Incident Response (DFIR)
Most DFIRs specialize in a few aspects and have
less knowledge in others.
• This makes most DFIRS T-Shaped People (see
the T above now?), who have deep skills in
specific areas and more limited in skills in
others. I’ve talked before about how I’m
confident in some of my skills and less so in
other skills.
• One of the things that makes DFIR different
than many other professions is most DFIRs
are jack of all trade types. I’m not excellent at
malware analysis, but I can do a little bit. At
the same time I’m better at Network
Forensics than most.
Why is this important? Two key reasons:
• Not everyone needs to have the same skills.
It’s ok to have an affinity for a one skill and
struggle a bit more with another.
• DFIR teams must focus on complimentary
skills. If you have a team strong in memory
forensics perhaps you want your next hire to
be a strong malware analyst. No one person
can be an expert in everything, but your team
should have strength across the board.https://sroberts.io/posts/introduction-to-dfir/

6. T-shaped UX content strategy professional
• I’m a T-shaped UX design
professional. I have always
focused on content. But my
digital experience also includes
plenty of information
architecture, research, design,
development, and usability work.
• Here’s how my hours of UX
experience break down.
https://ellessmedia.com/portfolio/t-shaped-ux-pro/

7. The Diagram of a T-Shaped Marketer at Buffer
The vertical bar on the T represents the
depth of related skills and expertise in a
single field, whereas the horizontal bar is
the ability to collaborate across
disciplines with experts in other areas
and to apply knowledge in areas of
expertise other than one’s own.
https://buffer.com/resources/t-shaped-
marketer/

8. Educating T-shaped
professionals in strategic
design management
“Disciplinary knowledge is typically educated in universities, but multidisciplinary approaches
are still in a minor role. The expectations of the industry, however, require for novel approaches
that combine different disciplinary views and knowledge bases and, even more importantly,
provide students with practical experience in working as part of multidisciplinary teams in
a real-life industry contexts.”

9. Gartner’s “versatilist” model