Before offering you a job or taking you under consideration for a leadership role, the majority of interviewers may assess your cognitive abilities. To perform well, it’s wise to hunt for a career that plays to your cognitive advantages.
Cognitive Ability — Is it Important in Your Career?
It’s always a good idea to keep your cognitive abilities fresh, whether it’s through a morning crossword, a daily brain teaser, or you’re getting into the Wordle craze. However, even if we train our bodies through physical activity and a healthy diet, it may be all too easy to forget about mental training.
However, it would be a mistake to ignore your cognitive abilities. Well-developed cognitive skills are now essential due to the increasingly quick-paced demands of the modern workforce. To stand out in a cutthroat job market, it is crucial to actively cultivate your cognitive abilities in everything from empathy to creativity to attention span.
What are Cognitive Skills?
Cognitive ability is the mental capacity of a person to comprehend and perform tasks like reading, thinking, learning, paying attention, reasoning, and remembering. Together, these brain processes empower you to complete your tasks efficiently and process the information you encounter daily.
Essential Cognitive Skills to Work on for your Future
1. Attention
According to Indeed, the most crucial cognitive ability for excelling at work is attentiveness. Strong cognitive abilities can aid you in preventing attention from being drawn away from the most crucial work.
Three sub-skills of attention can be distinguished:-
- Sustained Attention — concentrating on one task for an extended period.
- Selective Attention — retaining focus despite interruptions like responding to emails or chit-chatting with coworkers.
- Split Attention — attending to multiple ongoing tasks in a day without losing track of your progress.
2. Agile Thinking
Agile thinking is a crucial cognitive capacity that goes hand in hand with adaptability. Employers will take notice of workers who can swiftly and independently pick up new skills outside of their area of specialization.
Agile thinking is the ability to think laterally on the spot, to always have a backup plan — and a backup plan for your backup plan — and to be open to learning from past mistakes so that you can move forward.
3. Adaptability
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the most important cognitive abilities in 2022 will be flexibility. Adaptability has become the standard in many businesses after years of interruptions caused by COVID. As a result, flexible workers will be in high demand in the future workplace.
4. Prioritization
Prioritization and time management abilities have always been crucial. The capacity to prioritize and juggle various activities, frequently with short lead periods, will be a crucial cognitive skill to succeed in the future workplace, though, since adaptability and agility are also in high demand.
Conclusion
It is a good idea to evaluate your mental strengths and shortcomings since it puts you in a better position to make changes. You can utilize this information to uncover a suitable career path or a company looking for employees with those particular abilities and strengths throughout the job search process.
Understanding your cognitive abilities will help you identify areas where you can grow and move closer to your career goals, even if you already appreciate the job you have.
When you acquire cognitive skills that are particular to the objectives of your firm, you can discover that your employer extends promotions, pay raises, or more responsibilities.
About the Author
BCjobs.ca is Western Canada’s largest job board, and host of “Innovators” a weekly podcast interviewing top recruiters in BC and across Canada. Check out our recent interview with WestJet’s Senior Product Manager Justin Laufer (Podcast link) and Hootsuite’s Director of Program Management, Kevin Mueller (Podcast link).
