T-Shaped Skills: What Internal Comms Teams Really Need
Read a few internal comms job descriptions and a pattern quickly emerges.
Strong writer. Senior stakeholder manager. Comfortable with intranet platforms. Confident working with leadership. Five years’ experience in communications. Maybe a passing reference to being “digitally savvy”.
The list is familiar enough that most of us barely notice it any more. But read it carefully and something starts to stand out – not what’s there, but what’s missing.
Where are the requirements for accessibility literacy? Analytics confidence? Governance awareness? Understanding how content is structured, targeted and maintained?
The uncomfortable truth is that many IC job specs still focus on a visible specialism – the writer, the editor, the channel expert – while overlooking the shared skills that make modern digital communication work.
That matters because the skills nobody hires for are often the ones holding the whole system up.
The job changed. The spec didn’t.
Internal comms is no longer simply about producing content. That shift has happened gradually enough that many organisations barely noticed it happening.
In our earlier post on the five-layer model, we argued that internal communication now operates across a connected ecosystem: Plan, Collaborate, Publish, Distribute and Discuss. Those layers exist whether organisations recognise them or not. They shape how communication is planned, created, governed, delivered and interpreted.
IC increasingly looks less like journalism and more like orchestration. The work isn’t just drafting messages – it’s coordinating systems. Planning campaigns. Governing channels. Managing publishing workflows. Interpreting analytics. Designing distribution. Facilitating discussion. Working across platforms and functions to keep the whole experience coherent.
That does not make writing less important – effective content remains fundamental. But it’s no longer the whole job.
The problem is that many hiring assumptions still reflect an older model of communications work. We continue recruiting for the journalist while expecting the successful candidate to operate as strategist, stakeholder-wrangler, product owner, analyst and governance lead.
Then we wonder why teams feel stretched.
Structure is downstream of capability, not a substitute for it. And capability is wider than many job descriptions admit.
The case for T-shaped skills in internal comms
One of the most useful ways to think about this is through a T-shaped skills model, widely used across digital disciplines.
The vertical bar of the ‘T’ represents deep expertise. This is the specialism somebody brings to the team: content design, information architecture, campaign orchestration, automation, community management, analytics, channel strategy or something equally valuable.
Teams need these verticals. But the horizontal bar matters just as much.
These are the foundational skills everyone needs, regardless of specialism:
the ability to write in plain language
accessibility awareness
data literacy
channel judgement
governance understanding
a grasp on how digital communication systems work together
The goal is not for everyone to become an expert in everything. That would be unrealistic and unnecessary. The goal is shared competence and concentrated expertise.
Most IC teams understand the importance of specialisms. Fewer pay equal attention to the foundations that connect them. And that creates an imbalance.
Teams can become well stocked on verticals and unexpectedly thin on horizontals. You may have brilliant writers, strong relationship managers and experienced platform specialists – yet still lack the shared capability that keeps the whole system healthy.
That becomes visible in subtle ways. Accessibility is treated as a final check instead of part of authoring. Analytics dashboards exist but nobody feels confident interpreting them. Governance is viewed as somebody else’s responsibility. Targeting decisions rely on habit or instinct rather than evidence.
None of these failures look dramatic in isolation. Collectively, they shape whether communication works or not.
The horizontal bar is load-bearing
The horizontal bar is not decorative – it’s load-bearing.
In our companion Governance post, we argue that governance is the hidden infrastructure beneath a healthy digital workplace. Governance sets the rules, clarifies ownership and keeps systems coherent. But governance only works when people can operate within it confidently and consistently.
This is where the horizontal bar does its work. It’s what stops an intranet filling with jargon nobody can scan. It’s what notices that a supposedly “all staff” message excludes frontline colleagues. It’s what catches weak metadata before search becomes unusable. It’s what reads the analytics dashboard and spots a reach gap or adoption lag before it becomes a problem.
None of this is glamorous. All of it is non-negotiable. And yet these are often the very skills left vague or invisible in hiring and development conversations.
The irony is difficult to ignore. Most IC teams spend significant energy discussing tools, channels and structure while giving less attention to the shared capability needed to operate them. As we explored in our earlier post on standardisation and usability, structure only helps when people understand how to work within it.
Most internal comms teams are closer to a capability gap than they realise
Capability problems are rarely obvious at first.
Many organisations assume they’re adequately covered because work continues to happen. Until somebody leaves. Then the hidden fragility appears, as most IC teams are one resignation away from a capability gap they didn’t know they had.
Perhaps one person holds most of the Publish knowledge. Perhaps measurement sits with a single analyst. Perhaps three people overlap heavily on news production while nobody owns taxonomy, accessibility or structured authoring.
This is why capability mapping is so revealing. We explore a practical approach in the book, but the principle is straightforward: understand where capability exists, where it overlaps, where it’s fragile and where it’s missing.
These exercises often surface uncomfortable truths:
single points of failure
duplicated effort
skills gaps nobody had formally acknowledged
a mismatch between the team structure organisations think they have and the capability reality underneath it
That’s not a reason for panic – it’s simply better diagnosis. Capability mapping applies the same principle we explored in our earlier post on intranet audits versus discovery: understanding what is really happening before deciding what to fix.
AI changes the shape of the role – not the need for humans
If all of this already feels important, AI makes it harder to ignore.
The IC role is beginning to shift. Not from communicator to machine operator, but from writer to orchestrator. AI can already help draft copy, summarise documents and generate variations at impressive speed. But it also changes what becomes most valuable.
The vertical skill most organisations have historically prioritised – drafting – is precisely the area AI is augmenting fastest.
The horizontal bar looks different:
judgement
accessibility
ethics
governance
plain language
context
the ability to assess whether content is accurate, appropriate, inclusive and trustworthy
AI is coming for the vertical. The horizontal is what stays human. Which makes hiring for “great writer” or “strong analyst” alone in 2026 feel increasingly incomplete.
The question is no longer simply, “Who can create content?” It’s, “Who can design, govern and orchestrate a communication system responsibly?”
Because internal communication was never only about producing words. It’s about helping people understand, act and trust. And (thankfully) that work still belongs to humans.
Digital Communications at Work explores this in more detail in Chapter 7, where we introduce the T-shaped capability model, capability mapping and the evolving role of internal comms in the age of AI. Because governance may set the rules – but capability is what makes them work.