Yeah, but I don’t have a creative job

Glassdoor, a leading employee review and career search website, has nearly thirty thousand job openings under the search query, noncreative positions.

Everything from website developers to operations managers to user researchers to logistics management specialists. As if to say, attention all left brained people, if you’re someone who doesn’t think of themselves as creative, then we’ve got a career opportunity for you. Inquire today!

This bothers me on a cellular level. Because there’s no such thing as a noncreative job. Creativity will always be essential for all career success. Particularly as automation eats the world of work more and more, it is the innate, human capacity for creativity that will make professionals more employable.

Two pieces of research prove this hypothesis.

Mckinsey’s study on automation and the future of the workforce reported that the demand for higher cognitive skills, including creativity, will rise close to ten percent in the next decade.

Their data confirmed that there is a degree of innovative thinking that’s essential in every position, regardless of its core professional focus. Creative problem solving and coming up with ideas is a highly interpersonal and emotional skill that transcends role, learning style, personality type and disposition.

Ask yourself this. What skills do you offer that can’t be borrowed, replicated or programmed by a machine?

The second piece of research comes from journal of organizational creativity. Their studies found that the creative skillset is needed in all types of organizations and industries today. And these jobs go far beyond the artistic endeavor or scientific discovery that has been traditionally labeled as creative work.

Business as diverse as journalism, finance, manufacturing, health care, government and professional services today all require deep expertise and original ideas in order to be successful. As such, these organizations need to consider how their management processes support their ability to attract, motivate, and retain creative individuals.

And those who work for them need to accept, embrace and capitalize on the unique brand of innovative thinking they bring to their job, regardless of what story they’ve been telling themselves about how creative they are. Seems like the very human skill of creativity has proven to be at a premium, and is only growing in importance.

The question you have to ask yourself is, how does that capability express itself in your life in ways that are useful to yourself and others?

That’s the good news about this skill. There is no one way to be creative. Everybody innovates within whatever mental, emotional and existential contexts of their life own situation. That’s precisely why this new discipline was named Personal Creativity Management (PCM).

Emphasis on the personal. In any given PCM system, there’s a robust arsenal of tools and solutions custom fit for each individual’s unique personality, value system and life situation.

That way, there’s no such thing as a noncreative job. Creating is something each of make part of our normal life, rather than something special and separate from it.

Look, we’re human. Humans make things. That’s what we do. It’s the core differentiator of our species.

And the quicker we accept, embrace and exploit that innate skillset, as it manifests for our unique makeup, the more valuable and employable we ultimately become.

What if there was no such thing as a noncreative job?