Creativity

Creativity is becoming more and more important in the workplace. Employers want to hire people who can think outside of the box and use their imagination to come up with original and innovative ideas however big or small.

How you're developing your SENse of creativity

You may not notice it, but you're probably already doing a lot of things that show you're creative. If you're not, then here are some suggestions of how and when you can start developing your creativity.

• Each time you're able to imagination a situation and you can describe what you're imagining

• Each time you're able to bring something from your imagination to life - however that may be

• Each time you generate an idea after being given instructions

• Each time you combine more than one concept to generate an idea

• Each time you come up with an idea to improve a situation or resolve a problem

• Each time you use a mind map to plan out your ideas

• Each time you consider different perspectives to help develop your ideas

• Each time you innovate effectively on your own or in a group

• Each time you share your knowledge, resources and tools to help other generate ideas

• Each time you seek out varied experiences and stimuli to help to develop your ideas

develop your creativity

By using online courses, you can better understand employability skills and take extra steps to develop any skills you need work on.

To develop your creativity, try these sessions by Barclays Life Skills (you will need to make a free account)

You can keep track of anything you do to develop your employability skills on UNIFROG.

Understanding creative thinking

How making a pizza got me a promotion

Putting creative thinking into action

Build your evidence

You need to be able to prove to future employers or universities that you have the skills they want. Try preparing an example answer to the question: "Creativity is really important in our company/for this course. Can you tell us about a time you've used your creativity successfully"

Situation

• Explain the situation you were in.

• Aim to answer the questions ‘what/where/when’, for example, “In the third year of my business studies degree” or “when I was working as a retail assistant in a shop last summer”.

Task

• What did you do, and what did the task or role involve?

• Explain your tasks and responsibilities briefly.

Action

• What did YOU do to meet the objective of/complete the task?

• You might want to cover what you did and how you did it, including what skills you used.

Result

• What was the outcome?

• Did you make a difference?

• Can you quantify this?

Reflection

• What did you do well?

• What didn’t go as well as you’d hoped?

Strengthen

• After reflection, what would you have done differently?

• What could have been improved to achieve an even greater success?