The T in STEM – The T-Shaped Professional
From Rick McMaster
Last month I talked about the move to incorporate more letters into STEM or give additional meaning to those already there. We need to keep it simple while maintaining a common understanding of what we mean and define the skills students need to be successful as they start careers. A number of people have already touched upon these proficiencies, and I would like to mention two of these people.

First is Tony Wagner who described them in “The Global Achievement Gap” as

• critical thinking and problem solving
• collaboration across networks and leading by influence
• agility and adaptability
• initiative and entrepreneurialism
• effective oral and written communication
• accessing and analyzing information
• curiosity and imagination.

In his more recent book, “Creating Innovators”, Dr. Wagner has adapted Teresa Amabile's three elements of creativity—expertise, creative thinking skills and motivation—to describe how we can develop innovators.

Another approach is described in Patrick F. Bassett’s blog “The Five Cs + One”. (I am partial to alliteration as you saw in the April issue.) Mr. Bassett’s Cs includes a similar set of skills that are critical to success in the 21st century: creativity, character, critical thinking, communication, cosmopolitanism and collaboration.

I propose that the “T” in STEM, in addition to Technology, represents the T-shaped professional. The first reference to this term dates over 20 years ago in David Guest’s “The hunt is on for the Renaissance Man of computing”. It has continued to evolve over time but the basis has remained the same; the vertical bar represents depth and the horizontal bar, breadth. Wagner, Bassett and others all address this horizontal bar.

You can represent various elements of the bars as shown below

T-shaped people are ready for Teamwork; they are excellent communicators, with real world experience; they are deep or specialized in at least one culture, one discipline and one systems area; but they have good teamwork skills interacting with others who are deep in other cultures, disciplines and systems. T-shaped professionals also make excellent entrepreneurs, able to innovate with others to create new technology, business, and societal innovations. T-shaped people are adaptive innovators, and well prepared for life-long learning in case they need to become deep in some new area; they are better prepared than I-shaped people, who lack the breadth.

We need to incorporate all these elements as we move STEM forward. It’s not just science, technology, engineering and math but much more.

Next month I’ll talk about Teachers TryScience, a collaborative resource for teachers worldwide.

Your comments are always welcome, @drkold.

Rick McMaster is the STEM Advocate at IBM’s University Programs Worldwide.

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