Understanding the T-Score: A Comprehensive Measure of Professional Development

* FREE FOR ISSIP MEMBERS

What is “T-Shape?”

The letter T is a paradigm for the idea that every professional has achieved some level of depth in a system or field of expertise (the Stem of the T) and some level of breadth across many systems or disciplines (the Top of the T).

• Becoming more T-shaped, then, means adding depth or breadth through any one of a myriad of possible activities and occasions.
• “More” T-shaped means more depth and breadth are harnessed through your achievements, roles, recognitions, and other activities.
• The concept of the “T-shape” professional is helpful for understanding how our working personas develop throughout lifetimes of experiences.

Articles in the professional press, conference proceedings, research reports, and academic papers have appeared frequently over the past 10 years as the concept became defined, adopted, and refined by academics, service and manufacturing corporations.

ISSIP Partners with MyT-Me

Recognizing the helpfulness of the T-shape paradigm, ISSIP has promoted T-shaped thinking in its programs and publications. Partnering with and supporting MyT-Me, an application that reads resumés, interprets them using AI and other technology, and computes a T-Top score, a T-Stem score, and total T-Score based on a consistent internal algorithm has been a major enhancement to ISSIP’s value added proposition for its members. Two recent ISSIP webinars explain the work leading up to the MyT-Me platform and how ISSIP members are granted free access to it.

Benefits for ISSIP Members

• Clear visualization of a person’s strengths and weaknesses based on their past experience, achievements, and personal interests.
• Gap analysis with AI: By framing goals within the context of the MyT-Me platform, the system can be used to forecast the T-score impact of planned activities before they take place.
• Team and Department T-Scores with AI: MyT-Me can be extended to present a Team Dashboard based on the MyT-Me scores of its members and depicting the Team T-Shape. The impact of adding and removing specific team members can be clearly displayed in the Team T Dashboard.