Why Companies Sort Workers Into Shapes Like I, T, and M

Picture a job market where a single letter, I, T, V, or M, says more about your career prospects than the title on your resume. That is the shorthand four co-hosts on Students Incorporated, the student-produced podcast out of the International Community School of Bangkok (ICS Bangkok), spent a segment working through under the guidance of host Mr. Jason. It is also, unbeknownst to most people who use it, a piece of consulting jargon that is nearly half a century old and suddenly urgent again, for a reason that has nothing to do with office culture: artificial intelligence is actively rewriting which of those four shapes actually keeps a person employed.

A Metaphor Built Before Any of Its Current Users Were Born

The letter-shape framework did not start at a design agency or a Silicon Valley all-hands. It traces to McKinsey & Company in the 1980s, then picked up momentum after a 1991 talk on engineering careers by consultant David Guest, before IDEO's chief executive, Tim Brown, gave it the name that stuck: the "T-shaped person," a phrase he popularized in a widely read 2010 interview describing how the design firm builds project teams, according to a summary of the concept's history. Brown's version was specific: the vertical stroke of the T is depth in one discipline, the horizontal stroke is enough range to genuinely collaborate across others, and IDEO built its hiring process around finding people who had both.

That is roughly the version Premi, Mia, Frank, and Joseph worked through on air, extended out to two more shapes. Premi opened with the "I": someone "highly specialized in one area," she said, comparing it to an aerospace engineer or an intellectual-property lawyer, a worker whose value comes from depth with almost no breadth, and whose risk is getting stuck if the one skill stops being needed. Mia took the T, describing someone with "deep expertise in one area" but enough working knowledge of others "to communicate between different teams instead of just staying in the bubble." Frank explained the V as two full verticals instead of one, an employee expert in, say, marketing and data analytics rather than marketing alone. Joseph closed with the M: multiple deep specializations at once, the shape of "an entrepreneur who's an expert in finance, business strategy, and product development," and, by his own admission, exhausting to actually be.

Before the panel got there, Joseph had already put his finger on the more honest version of the question. "I don't have a work style, but I wonder if I might be a mix of couple," he said, and the host agreed instantly: people are not locked into one shape for life; they evolve, or hold traits from several at once. It is a more accurate description of most real careers than any single letter is.

Why the Argument Got Urgent

Two years ago, this would have been a tidy classroom exercise. It reads differently now because of what is happening to the demand side of the labor market. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of core workforce skills to change by 2030, and projected a churn of 92 million jobs displaced against 170 million newly created, a net gain of 78 million but a much larger reshuffling underneath it. The same report found AI and big data topping the list of rising skills, alongside a rise in demand for narrowly technical roles like AI and machine-learning specialists and big-data specialists, exactly the kind of deep, narrow "I" that Premi described. Simultaneously, the report ranked creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, and agility among the fastest-rising skills employers want, which is the T and the V case, not the I case. Both trends are accelerating at once, and that tension, not a clean win for generalists or for specialists, is the actual state of the market Premi, Mia, Frank, and Joseph are about to graduate into.

Strength lies in differences, not similarities.

That line, delivered earlier in the same episode by co-host Frank during the show's quote-of-the-day segment and credited to management author Stephen R. Covey, turns out to double as a decent summary of what companies are now discovering about their own workforces: a team of only I-shapes cannot talk to each other, and a team of only T-shapes has no one who goes deep enough to be dangerous.

The Real Advice Is Called Job Crafting

Mia's headline-news segment, delivered right before the shape discussion, previewed the practical answer with a concept it did not name outright: reshaping the job you already have rather than waiting to be handed a different one. That practice has an actual name, job crafting, coined in 2001 by Yale School of Management's Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, who studied how hospital custodial staff redefined their own roles, some limiting themselves strictly to cleaning duties, others treating patient comfort and ward atmosphere as part of the job description even though no manual said so. Wrzesniewski and Dutton's model breaks the practice into three moves: task crafting, changing the actual scope of what you do; relational crafting, changing who you work with and how; and cognitive crafting, changing how you think about the meaning of the work itself. It is, in effect, a way for an I-shaped specialist to grow a horizontal stroke without ever changing employers.

Mia's segment also cited a live example of a company that built this into policy rather than leaving it to individual initiative: 3M, whose "15 percent time" program, in place since 1948, lets employees spend part of their week chasing self-directed ideas. It is the same policy that let engineer Art Fry turn a colleague's failed adhesive experiment into the Post-it Note in 1980, a product that still anchors 3M's office-supplies business more than four decades later. The company's own patent count, in the tens of thousands, is largely credited to that same slice of unstructured time.

Mia's third example, activity-based working, or ABW, fared less cleanly under closer scrutiny. Some workplace studies have found real upside: one comparative analysis measured activity-based workers as 16% more productive than peers in fixed seating, and a separate 2020 study tied the shift to a 17% rise in employee satisfaction, largely through a stronger sense of autonomy over where and how people work. But more recent research complicates the pitch. A 2025 study on ABW's effects on work recovery found it can leave employees less able to properly switch off after the workday, and a systematic review comparing ABW to traditional private offices found it measurably worse for tasks requiring sustained focus. The honest takeaway is closer to what the podcast's own shape framework argues: flexibility helps, but only when it is matched to the actual task, not applied as a blanket policy.

Building the Shape Yourself, Without Waiting for a Job Title

There is a version of this story playing out among Premi, Mia, Frank, and Joseph's own age group already, and it looks less like career planning and more like necessity. Deputy's Big Shift 2026 report found that poly-employment, working more than one job simultaneously, has hit its highest rate in over a decade, with Gen Z making up more than half of everyone doing it. A 2025 Fiverr survey found 64% of Gen Z respondents in the U.S. now consider having multiple income streams essential to financial security, not a side hustle but a baseline expectation. Some of that is defensive, a hedge against a job market that feels less stable than the one their parents entered. But it is also, functionally, a way of building a V or an M shape from outside any single employer's org chart, gaining a second or third vertical through freelance work, side projects, or informal apprenticeships rather than waiting for a manager to sponsor the growth.

That is the quieter point underneath the segment's closing question, which the hosts left for listeners to sit with: which shape are you now, and which one do you actually want to grow into? For a classroom of teenagers still years from their first full-time job, it is a useful head start on a debate the rest of the labor market is still working out in real time.

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