By 2025, 49% of the skills currently present in the workforce are expected to lose relevance and be automated or be replaced by AI, as believed by executives surveyed by eDX. This worrying revelation casts the spotlight on the importance of acquiring transferable soft skills that can help individuals stay relevant in the job market and enhance their ability to adapt to new job scopes and roles. But what are the in-demand soft skills we should be focusing on?
Top Skill That Is in Demand
According to the Future of Jobs Report 2023 released by the World Economic Forum (WEF), cognitive skills are increasingly prioritised. Notably, the surveyed companies ranked creative thinking and analytical thinking as skills growing in importance most rapidly. Perhaps more interestingly, 73.2% of businesses also believe that the importance of creative thinking in the modern workplace is greater than that of analytical thinking.
What Is Creative Thinking?
While analytical thinking is concerned with using facts and logic to narrow down to a select few answers, creative thinking adopts a divergent process. It often involves approaching situations with fresh perspectives while keeping an open mind and challenging existing assumptions. Doing so often results in the generation of unconventional ideas or the identification of connections between concepts and commonalities among seemingly unrelated circumstances.
Why Is Creativity Important?
Even if you are not considering a future career in traditional creative fields, like design or advertising, creative thinking is a transferable skill worth exploring for the following reasons:
1. Creative Thinking Cannot Be Automated
In the era of advancing artificial intelligence (AI), many logical processing tasks may become automated as technology matures. However, creative thinking remains a skill that can resist automation. This is because AI produces “new” works by learning from a database and repurposing or recombining existing information from this training database. It cannot conceive entirely novel ideas or concepts independently without human input.
In contrast, humans generate ideas that break free from existing structures and styles, leading to entirely original creations. Having this skill can thus set creative thinkers apart regardless of their profession.
2. Creative Thinkers Can Solve New Problems
Every day, new challenges can arise in the workplace. While it is intuitive to gravitate towards familiar, tried-and-tested solutions, resistance to change can impede progress or even be detrimental. A case in point is the Covid-19 pandemic. Without past data or examples, employers and employees alike will have to rely on their creative thinking skills to devise novel ways of working or new business models to stay afloat during trying times.
How to Be Creative
While some individuals may naturally be born creative, it is possible to learn and polish your creative thinking skills over time.
1. Explore New Things
A good way to start is to explore content outside your usual preferences. For instance, you can select a different genre of movie or book from what you usually choose. By adding diversity to your daily interactions, you can gain exposure to new perspectives that broaden your thinking.
Moreover, if you are a student at PSB Academy, you’ll find a range of courses that can help you in this journey. Exploring various fields of study can provide further opportunities to discover new things and think out of the box, allowing you to develop a more versatile skill set.
2. Observe and Discuss with Others
Creativity manifests in various ways, be it through art, writing, culinary innovation, or problem-solving. Observing how others express their creativity and engaging in conversations with them about their methods can offer valuable insights into how they cultivate their creative thinking skills, enabling you to learn quickly.
For instance, PSB Academy’s students will have opportunities to participate in such discussions with peers in programmes across different academic levels, from diploma courses to bachelor’s degrees. Through this, you will also be able to receive feedback on your ideas, enabling you to further polish your creative thinking abilities.
Curious to learn more about how you can develop creative thinking and gain other in-demand skills specific to a discipline of interest? Explore PSB Academy’s courses today and see how our curriculum can support your aspirations.
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