The most innovative organizations are filled not with highly trained specialists, but with so-called "T-shaped" employees who are able to juggle multiple tasks and quickly learn new skills, according to a blog post in The Wall Street Journal's CIO Journal.
A T-shaped, or hybrid, worker is one that not only shares with a specialized, "I-shaped" worker a deep expertise in one or more fields, but is also adept in broader, multidisciplinary soft skills such as collaboration, critical thinking and creative problem-solving. According to the post, written by former IBM IT leader Irving Wladawsky-Berger, PhD, these workers are increasingly more desirable across industries due to their high productivity and low costs, and the growing complexity of nearly every organizations' products and services.
Hard skills, meanwhile, are "deep but narrow," according to Dr. Wladawsky-Berger, with a constantly shortening half-life. "The more specific and concrete the skills, the more they are prone to be automated or significantly transformed by advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, making it necessary for workers to be flexible enough to keep adapting to the continuing changes in the workplace," he wrote.