Shaping the 21st Century Professionals

The 3rd annual T-Summit 2016 took place on March 20-21 at the historic National Academies building in Washington DC.

The blurring of the virtual and physical world, and traditional boundaries driven by technological advances are transforming the work place and future of jobs. There is a huge gap between what higher education teaches and what employers require. The T-shape concept proposes a professional development framework (that includes empathy, interpersonal skills, design thinking, and even the arts, on top of domain specialization) to close this gap and lead to next generation of professionals that will be highly skilled and in demand. This year T-Summit assembled more than 200 scholars and practitioners representing academia, industry, and government to explore “Transformational Approaches to Creating T-Shaped Professionals”.

ISSIP had the distinct honor (along with IBM, Cisco, MSU, Virginia Tech, Purdue, and others) to have sponsored the T-Summit 2016. Many thanks to T-Summit Planning Committee, and our local hosts UIDP (Tony Boccanfuso, President) and GUIRR (Susan Sauer Sloan, Director) for a fantastic event. Special thanks to Jim Spohrer (ISSIP & T-Summit Co-Founder, and IBM) for his continued leadership in growing and strengthening the ISSIP-T-Summit partnership. Also special thanks to:

DJ Christman (Cisco, ISSIP) – conference project management
Stepheni Schlinker (MSU) – website
Valerie Correale (Cisco, ISSIP) – invites, ISSIP- T-Summit Play Book
Michelle Lubaczewski (UIDP) – program book,ISSIP- T-Summit Play Book
Korine Wawrzynski (MSU)- previous years conference project manager and guide
JoAnn Winson (IBM) – panel preparation and logistics, previous years planning
Carolina Boccanfuso (UIDP), logistics
Claudette Baylor-Fleming (GUIRR), logistics
Megan Nicholson (GIRR), logistics
Paul Magnon, project management early on

This year the T-Summit held over 60 sessions, including keynotes, diverse panels, and number of parallel sessions covering latest learnings on T-shaped professionals, and exploring how policies, curricula, students and employees can prepare the future workforce.

Distinguished ISSIPers spoke and moderated multiple sessions.

Gerhard Gudergan, and Jim Spohrer co-chaired a break out session on “The Transformative Power of Service Innovation for Digital Transformation and Platforms to Engage Students on Real-World Business & Societal Challenges”. In this workshop we learned about specific challenges and opportunities organizations face to leverage technologies for innovation and growth (digital transformation). A framework developed by ISSIP (an effort led by the Service Innovation SIG) was presented as a way to break traditional barriers and support organizations to successfully drive their digital transformation.

Monique Morrow (ISSIP President, Cisco CTO) moderated an international panel that shared perspectives on T-development from the European Commission, Dublin City University, as well as Knod which is aiming to close the gap between employment and education through employer project-based learning and a global online education network.

JoAnne Winson (IBM) and Jim Spohrer led a very dynamic and lively World where 5 groups, each with 2 speakers, engaged in dialogues covering topics including Building T-Shaped Competence, Systems Thinking & T-Shapes, Individual & Organizational Measurement & T-Shapes, The Future of T-Shape Conversations — Sparking and Maintaining the Dialogue, and Vocations & Professions.

In the closing session, I presented my perspectives on the role professional associations can play in closing the skills gap, and explained how ISSIP members are doing that. I also announced our plan to publish the T-Summit 2016 book (to view the call for papers click here). Afterwards Monique Morrow, Ralph Badinelli, (ISSIP VP, Virginia Tech), Kazuo Iwano (ISSIP BOD Member, Japan Science and Technology Agency), and Jim joined me to say their closing remark and emphasized the key role ISSIP as a professional association is playing in developing T-shape professionals.

One of my major takeaways that was also echoed throughout the conference is that STEM education is necessary but no longer sufficient for professional success in the 21st century. This was underscored by Jon Taillon, Deloitte, who spoke about the importance of “STEAM” for the “IT worker of the future”; where the “A” in STEAM may signify the Art, Architecture, Anthropology and other creative learnings that allow one to fold in design thinking into any IT function or discipline.

Jeff Saperstein, one of ISSIP distinguished members and Co-founder of CVC Group ( author of the book “Service Thinking“) who also participated at the T-Summit has outlined his take-aways in this nice blog post.

Also, check out these short video interviews where Jeff and I share some of our take aways and insights: