Detecting Occupation-Specific Creativity

Today, creativity is considered a success factor across all occupational fields and a core competence of the 21st century. In vocational education and training (VET), creativity is defined as problem-solving ability and ascribed to the transversal competences, as such it has now found its way into the curricula. Above that, creativity is always context-dependent in terms of work environment and the specific demands of an occupation. The aim of the interview study introduced in this paper was to measure facets of creative potential in selected occupations. The results show that in the four occupations studied (“commercial clerks”, “specialist in care”, “IT specialist” and “design engineers”), different facets of creativity are relevant to successfully cope with creative situations. Overall, divergent and convergent thinking were identified as the most important facets of creativity in the professional creative situations examined.