When employees in your organization face unfamiliar challenges or opportunities, are they equipped to dive right in? New situations or new roles may require additional skills.

Phil Jarvis, Director of Global Partnerships at Career Cruising, writes: “Accelerating technological advances have rendered many jobs obsolete, raised the skills requirements of the remaining jobs in all sectors, and are producing new types of jobs at an unimagined rate. More formal education, technical training, and soft skills are now demanded of workers in all job sectors, but especially in new and emerging career fields. Employers need people who can problem-solve and innovate, collaborate effectively with others of diverse backgrounds, have a thirst for learning, are responsible and dependable, and are fully committed to their employer’s success.”

What can you do, as a learning and development professional, to help employees gain creative and critical thinking skills?

When you’re asked to consult with a

manager in your organization about employee development needs, you use critical thinking skills to assess the problem and recommend solutions. You observe the context, gather information from a variety of sources, interpret and analyze data, recognize unstated assumptions and values, and hypothesize solutions. These are skills that employees in other areas of your organization need, too.

You may work with teams using brainstorming or other techniques to entertain a whole range of ideas when there is no fixed solution to a problem. This is one aspect of creative thinking — generating ideas by exploring many possible solutions, often in a spontaneous free-flowing manner. Creative thinking also includes making connections between seemingly disparate things to come up with new perceptions and hypotheses.

Harold Jarche’s words echo Phil Jarvis’: “Many jobs are now automated or outsourced. The jobs that are left are complex and always changing and require creative thinking skills. Innovation is

created through diversity of opinion and experience, openness to new ideas, and transparency about what you’re learning.”

More and more, employees are being asked to demonstrate their commitment to their organization not by rote attendance, but by thinking about and finding new ways to solve company problems. What can be done to prepare them to take on this role?

The what Jarche insists critical thinking must include a questioning of assumptions, including our own assumptions. Our thinking may be unclear, inaccurate, imprecise, irrelevant, narrow, shallow, illogical, or trivial, due to ignorance or misapplication of the appropriate learned skills of thinking. According to him, learning and development professionals should model a willingness to question all assumptions. He also maintains that the core skill needed for creative and critical thinking is attitude— an attitude that is always open to learning, curious about the world—or, what he calls

Facing the Future:

What skills will your employees need?

by: lee Weisser, med, ACC

Harold Jarche, Harold Stolovitch, and Ruth Clark, keynote speakers at CSTD’s two symposia this spring (in Montreal and Edmonton), remark on how learning and development professionals can help employees acquire skills to solve problems and find creative solutions to workplace challenges.

24 Th e Ca n a d i a n Le a r n i n g Jo u r n a L Sp r i n g 2012

“life in perpetual Beta.” Ruth Clark has written extensively

about guided discovery as a way to build these skills. She asserts that critical thinking skills can be developed through problem- based learning: • Learning in the context of solving a real-

world problem; • Learning through an inductive approach

that builds through experience; • Learning by taking action or making

decisions, and experiencing the consequences of those activities;

• Reflecting on what decisions were made, what worked, and what might be done more effectively.

Clark says, “There has been a large body of research on expertise in cognitive and physical domains demonstrating that expertise is primarily based on experience. But when real world opportunities to build expertise are infrequent, unsafe, lengthy, or too costly, guided discovery simulations can accelerate the speed of gaining the required expertise.”

Harold Stolovitch contends we move too quickly to creative problem solving. “First, we need to build foundational skills through clear expectations, a solid set of tools, guidelines for practice, and lots of feedback.”

Stolovitch says, “Most jobs don’t require excessive creative thinking. Most of our real life skills are automated—they require flexible application. Look at the processes we use to solve problems: we gather data and analyze the issues using strongly built- up diagnostic thinking patterns. We then hypothesize different types of solutions or variations of these derived from a solution repertoire also acquired over time. We need to access our expertise to address work requirements and challenges. In reality, we require more practice and feedback in building our skill sets by learning principles and procedures and applying these to increasingly more complex and unique instances.”

He is referring not to mechanical practice, but organized, deliberate practice where we build experience and gradually learn new things. Think of pianists who must run through scales every time they practice, before they start playing pieces. Then they play and practice ever more demanding pieces in accordance with increasingly tougher standards.

Stolovitch insists we need more

emphasis on building capability in employees in systematic ways based on what learning and human performance research evidence tells us actually works. Evidence- based management is derived from the practice of evidence-based medicine— evaluating research, and rejecting conventional wisdom and casual

benchmarking. Jarche agrees that critical thinking goes

hand in hand with evidence-based practice. One way of sharing good practice is to help employees connect with each other, since so much of learning is informal. Jarche suggests introducing tools such as video cameras and video conferencing to help people share their work.

The how Clark states that whether using a guided discovery or more traditional instructional design process, there are some techniques trainers can use to build critical and creative thinking skills.