T Profile – Specialist Generalist

From quite some time, professionals have been classified into two categories – Specialist and generalist. Generalists are the peoples who know something about everything, but have little deep knowledge and skill in area . While specialist are the people who have deep competencies in one area but have virtually no knowledge or skills in any other areas. Even in software world professionals are classified into two categories – people and technology. Professional with people skills are suppose to have some magical skill in dealing and communicating with other peoples and need not have any technical skills. While professionals with technology skills are obviously suppose to have deep technology skills but very little skills in dealing with people and communication. The really important question is, professionals with which type of profile will be required in current and future world. Once thing is certain – in future, every professional will be required, not only to work efficiently, but also continuously innovate. Innovation means doing something new and different which deliver enhanced value for money to all stakeholders. In the world of software, professional, who will have maximum potential to innovate, are likely have T profile. People with T profile, on one hand will have breadth of knowledge in software and other related disciplines; on the other hand they will also have deep competencies in few areas. Innovation required a wider horizon with deep insight. Only T profile can meet such requirements. Every software professional should have a knowledge and skill portfolio in line with T profile. He should make an explicit attempt to acquire his new knowledge and skills as per his knowledge portfolio. Google allow its employee to devote 20% of their time on projects/ideas which are purely decided by the employees themselves. A software professional should also devote some % of his work on his knowledge portfolio. He should periodically review his knowledge portfolio in order to align it to ever changing field of software development.