‘T-Shaping’ Your Career Is the Best Risk Mitigation Strategy (for now)
Right now, it’s almost impossible to scroll through LinkedIn or any other social media platform without encountering some variation of career doom-scrolling: “all the jobs are going to the bots,” “white-collar recession due to AI,” “graduates can’t find entry-level jobs.” Throw in the very real, very deep layoffs happening predominantly in US tech, and the media has found itself an extremely good meal to make.
I’ll reserve my broader views on this for now. What I can tell you is that Jack Hammer Global is busier than ever, which suggests that great human leaders are still very much in demand. But I’m not naive about what I’m seeing: shifts in certain sectors and specific roles are happening fast (right in front of me) and I don’t want to minimise the very real anxiety that a lot of people are sitting with about what lies ahead.
So, instead of adding to the noise with content that paints a bleak picture, I’ve been paying close attention to the thought leaders and practitioners who are offering something more useful: practical advice on how to actually prepare for the fast-changing jobs landscape. And the concept that keeps surfacing – the one I think deserves more airtime – is the T-Shaped Career.
Uhm, what does T-Shaped actually mean?
The concept is simple, even if the execution isn’t. The vertical bar of the “T” represents your domain of deep expertise — the area where you’ve put in the time, built the knowledge, and earned the credibility. The horizontal bar represents breadth: two or more adjacent skills that you can build with intention, and increasingly, with the help of AI tools.
The strategic logic is straightforward: if you want to be the most compelling candidate on a shortlist, or the most valuable person on your team when decisions about headcount are being made, you need to add more value, or be harder to replace.
Depth alone is no longer enough. The people who combine deep expertise with a set of adjacent, AI-augmented capabilities are the ones who will command attention – whether they’re interviewing for a new role or sitting tight and hoping not to appear on a restructuring list.
What does this look like in practice?
Here are a few examples to make this concrete:
- If your domain is B2B sales, the T-shape might mean learning to automate your outreach funnel using AI tools (effectively becoming your own SDR) and then adding a layer of basic content creation capability so you can produce your own marketing collateral without waiting for the marketing team.
- If you’re a finance professional, it could mean developing enough data analytics fluency to build your own dashboards in tools, while also upskilling in AI-assisted scenario modelling.
- And if you’re in HR or talent, it might mean learning to design and implement an AI-powered sourcing workflow alongside your existing expertise in organisational design or executive hiring.
None of this requires you to become an expert in those adjacent areas, because the bar is not mastery, it’s functional fluency. Enough to add value, enough to collaborate more intelligently across functions, and enough to demonstrate adaptability to any hiring manager or executive team paying attention.
Here’s the part the AI pundits gloss over
Extending your range is not as easy as it sounds, and it’s certainly not as frictionless as the “just use AI” crowd would have you believe. But, in my view, that’s actually a good thing.
If it were effortless, everyone would be doing it. The fact that building a meaningful T-shape requires dedicated time, intellectual energy, resourcefulness, and genuine adaptability means that most people will find reasons to defer it, even as they feel anxious about the changing landscape, and even as they watch colleagues being let go around them.
Because here’s the reality of it: the gap between people who are talking about future-proofing their careers, and people who are actually doing the work is enormous. The ones doing the work are those (few) who decided that waiting to see how things unfold was a less appealing option than knuckling down to learning new skills and extending their range.
Where to start
Start with an reality check of your vertical (your domain of expertise). Is it still holding its value, or are you starting to notice AI eroding parts of what made it distinctive? Then look laterally: what adjacent skills would make you meaningfully more versatile? And then (this is the part that matters most) go and actually build them, rather than adding them to the list of things you’ll get to when things settle down. Things are not going to settle down.
The people who are difficult to let go, difficult to pass over, and VERY difficult to replace, are not waiting for a perfect roadmap. They’re already iterating and learning new skills. That’s the real competitive advantage right now, and unlike most things being discussed in the great AI jobs debate, it’s entirely within your control
Author Info: Debbie Goodman
