If you’ve ever worried about being left behind, you’re not alone. The world of work is fast-changing, and HR needs to change with it. That means showing you have the skills to adapt, lead, and grow. But how can you be sure you’re keeping up? That’s where the T-Shaped HR Competency Model comes in.
In order to navigate and thrive in a more dynamic and disruptive future, you need a clear, future-focused framework against which to assess your skills. AIHR’s T-Shaped HR Competency Framework is designed to help HR professionals succeed in a new world of work by uncovering growth opportunities before they become gaps. Knowing where you stand and where you’re going gives you the ability to make yourself indispensable along the way. Let’s find out more about it.
AIHR’s T-Shaped HR Competency Model
The T-Shaped HR Competency Model identifies the competencies needed to be a modern, relevant, and impactful HR professional. It includes five generalist competencies and at least one functional competency in an HR specialization.
These competencies allow you to navigate the rapidly changing world of work and help your organization with the unknown challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. As a T-shaped HR professional, you will have the skills to work more effectively and efficiently, better collaborate with those within and outside of HR, and enhance your impact as a whole.
Here’s an overview of the T-Shaped HR Competent Model:
- Business acumen: The ability to interpret external trends, analyze customer needs, and co-create business strategy to achieve sustainable business results.
- Data literacy: The ability to analyze, interpret, and communicate people data to derive actionable insights, inform decision-making, and assess HR’s contribution to achieving strategic business objectives.
- Digital agility: The ability to utilize technology to increase the impact of HR and prepare the organization to adopt digital practices.
- People advocacy: the ability to build human-centric organizational cultures that promote productivity and wellbeing, navigate change, and hold the organization to ethical and sustainable standards.
- Execution excellence: The ability to deliver impact through practical problem-solving, engagement with stakeholders, and purposeful execution.
On top of these generalist competencies, you also need to build your expertise in at least one specialist competency. This can be from any of the many HR domains, including talent acquisition, compensation and benefits, learning and development, or people analytics. If you have leadership responsibilities, you also need the corresponding competency to build, manage, and lead teams, inspire and motivate others, and deal with conflict.
Succeeding in your career as a T-shaped HR professional
Better collaboration within and outside of HR
As a T-shaped HR professional, you speak the language of HR specialists, cross-functional colleagues, stakeholders, and the business as a whole. This allows you to foster better teamwork in areas such as finance, marketing, and IT. These departments often play essential roles in many HR projects, from workforce planning to employer branding. The T-shaped HR competencies also help you break down siloes. You have the skills to ensure smooth communication and cooperation between different HR functions and external vendors or consultants.
Altogether, the enhanced collaboration helps you build trust and credibility across departments and with business leaders. You’ll have the skills to position yourself not just as someone there to support others but as a proactive partner of the business.
Increased effectiveness and strategic impact
With deep expertise in a core HR area combined with a broader understanding of business and HR strategies, you’ll be able to deliver high-value contributions. This means you’ll be able to:
- Connect the dots between HR initiatives and organizational goals, ensuring that your work in HR helps the business succeed.
- Design holistic people solutions (for example, integrating performance management with learning and career pathing) that benefit both the employees and the organization.
- Act as a strategic people advisor to leadership, going beyond operations to influence long-term decisions.
Enhanced ability to innovate
Being T-shaped allows you to combine insights from different disciplines to design better policies, employee experiences, and HR systems. With your adaptable and flexible mindset, you’re more likely to challenge traditional thinking and ways of work and spot opportunities to improve or reinvent how HR delivers value. You’re in a perfect position to contribute to or even lead cross-functional teams to transform the organization.
Greater adaptability and resilience
Technological development, globalization, and socio-economic changes tend to have a disruptive effect on the world of work. Being T-shaped allows you to become more resilient in the face of change. You have crucial transferable skills to pivot between different roles or take on hybrid responsibilities. You’re also able to upskill faster by leveraging your solid foundation to build new competencies in areas like HR tech, data analytics, or employee experience. The breadth and depth of the expertise you bring ensure that you’ll always have a versatile skill set and mindset.
In short, being T-Shaped takes away a large part of the uncertainty of the future of work that threatens your career stability and longevity.
Becoming T-shaped with AIHR
Not sure yet whether you possess a T-Shaped skill set? Or perhaps you want to identify the skills you’re lacking? Take the T-Shaped HR Assessment! In 10 minutes, you’ll receive a detailed report on how you score across the five core HR competencies and where your strengths and weaknesses are to create a clear upskilling roadmap. Based on your result, you can use the HR Career Map to identify the future career paths you can take and what you need to get there.
Once you’ve identified your learning needs, be sure to check out the memberships that AIHR offers. If you’re lacking in a specific competency, such as data literacy, then check out our Single Membership. With 14+ certificate programs, you’re guaranteed to find something that suits your needs.
If you need upskilling in several different areas, then the Full Academy Access Membership is your best option. This membership gives you access to all of AIHR’s learning content, plus several features to help you excel in your work, from the Resource Library to the AIHR Copilot.
Want to experience AIHR before making the investment? Visit our Demo Portal and try out our lessons and features.
Building high-performing T-shaped HR teams
AIHR’s T-Shaped HR Competency Model is a powerful model for building high-performing HR teams capable of delivering strategic value to your organization. Pressing and disruptive people constantly threaten the future of work. To succeed, your organization needs HR professionals who are well-rounded, innovative, and adaptable. The best way to achieve this is by equipping your HR team with T-Shaped competencies.
You can easily integrate the T-Shaped HR Competency Model into many of your core HR processes and strategic activities, including:
- Role mapping: Map roles with both core and functional competencies. For example, an HR Generalist might need a combination of business acumen to understand the market, data literacy to translate numbers into tangible insights, and digital agility to track results using HR technology. They also need a deeper understanding of the employee lifecycle and stakeholder management.
- Succession planning: Identify high-potential talent using the T-Shaped framework as your benchmark. You need to assess successors not only on their technical HR knowledge, but also on their core competencies.
- Performance evaluation: Incorporate core T-Shaped competencies in your reviews. You can include criteria to assess both specialist contribution and generalist impact, such as data-driven decision-making, ability to navigate change, and technological innovation.
- Coaching and development: Use the T-Shaped model as a development conversation by helping team members assess their current competencies individually and plan their future growth. You can rely on the T-Shaped HR Assessment and AIHR’s Career Map tool.
Future-proofing your HR team with AIHR
There are several ways you can help your team build the skills they need to adapt to new expectations and changes:
- HR Advisory pairs you with one of our in-house HR experts, who helps you adapt the model to fit your organization’s needs and goals.
- HR Academy offers tailored learning paths for the different roles and levels in your team to build high-performing T-Shaped HR professionals at scale.
- HR Boot Camps to level-set your team around one or more T-shaped competencies in just 6 months.
Are you unsure which option is your best bet? Get a free consultation with one of our Learning Consultants and have all your questions answered.
