What are T-shaped People and Why Should We Hire or Develop Them?”

Developing T-Shaped People

Universities produce individuals who are deeply knowledgeable about one discipline. But what organizations need is an employee who is able to handle information from multiple sources, advance professional relationships across different organizations, contribute innovatively to organizational practices, and communicate with understanding across social, cultural, economic and scientific disciplines. That’s a T-shaped person – someone deep in one discipline, but also broad in many – knowledgeable in a number of disciplines, armed with many “soft skills,” – an innovator.

If we can’t realistically expect T-shaped people to come out of universities, we will have to develop them. Come hear about T-shaped people and how we can go about developing them in our organizations.

Jana Markowitz is an experienced IT management consultant and organization development (OD) professional. Her experience includes providing organizational change management for large IT projects as well as teaching people skills to IT and engineering professionals.

Jana founded The Collective Mind, a boutique consulting firm, in 1994 after a 15 year career as a technology and strategic planning consultant at IBM. Clients include NASA, Sears, Hilton Hotels, Buckman and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

She holds a BS in Computer Science and Math from Vanderbilt University and a MS in Organizational Psychology from the University of Memphis. Jana is also co-author with Bill Berghel, PMP, of the book Shifting Sands: The People Side of Project Management (2013).