Abstract:

Nowadays one of the most popular concepts among HR and job recruitment specialists is the concept of T-shaped skills. T-shaped person is a person that not only has deep skills and knowledge in one particular field (vertical bar of T), but also has basic knowledge and skills in a wide spectrum of fields (horizontal bar of T). Such persons can easily adapt to the changes in their work tasks, can collaborate with different experts in different fields and apply their knowledge in different areas. Traditional higher education curriculums usually teach students in one narrow field, so to make a T-shaped person we need to redesign traditional curriculum on the new basis.

This paper describes an application of the T-shaped skills concept to the design education, proposes a strategy of developing a curriculum for teaching students basing on this concept, discusses the case of the implementation of such curriculum at the Department of Service and Technology of Material Artistic Processing at South Ural State University. Authors also consider advantages and challenges of developing and implementation of such curriculum.

Keywords:

T-shaped skills, design curriculum, design education.