The good news is that there are a number of skills that are hard to automate as machines simply cannot mimic them. These skills have a significant impact, and they cannot be easily quantified. Yet, their relevance is growing in a highly digitized, disruptive world driven by data, automation, and targets.
One skill growing in its demand is critical thinking. According to reports, by 2030, those professionals and entrepreneurs demonstrating the ability to think critically will have the edge over their peers. They will be more employable than others who bring similar technical and domain skills to the table.
Despite these forecasts, critical thinking has yet to find a place in the curriculum of schools and colleges, leaving freshers with a higher employability deficit. However, by enrolling in a well-crafted critical thinking online course, professionals, entrepreneurs, gig workers, and consultants can effectively develop this skill and stay at the top of their game.
The value of critical thinking
Whether you are in project management, sales, public relations, relationship management, or journalism, you are continuously being placed in a situation where judgment plays a key role in your decisions. Functioning with assumptions can have dire consequences.
For example, say you own a business and reach a new target audience. You spend a large amount of money on a social media campaign, but it yields no results. In fact, the messaging of your campaign results in negative feedback.
Suppose you and your team had spent more time critically thinking about connecting with this audience, understanding their needs better, instead of making assumptions. In that case, the campaign might have had a different outcome. Perhaps you might not have done it at all because you realized it was not the right target audience for your business.
While critical thinking is a highly valued skill in workplaces, it can be applied in all aspects of life – from personal decisions such as buying a property to choosing between two job options.
Impact Of Being A Critical Thinker
Critical thinking is a highly valuable skill as it leads to better judgment, and the impact can manifest in multiple ways. Here are some examples.
Your company may save millions of dollars because you critically evaluated a decision where the stakes were especially high. Critical thinkers typically get promoted and are more likely to receive raises regularly.
You might make superior investment decisions about your money and achieve financial freedom at a younger age.
You may make the right judgment call in an emergency, such as what medical treatment to choose for yourself or someone you love.
If you work in government, who knows, you might be able to negotiate the next peace deal!
Critical thinking is especially relevant for delicate situations such as these.
Elevate your thinking
Another valuable virtue of critical thinking is that it helps fight a tendency to “groupthink. This mentality leads you to imbibe the beliefs, assumptions, and opinions or be highly influenced by them. This can be highly counterproductive in any context – business, financial decisions, social situations, and when one is faced with a life-altering decision.
Applying logic, as well as intuition with the relevant level of swiftness, leads to superior and timely judgment calls that are governed by critical thinking. This is so important because you will need to live with the consequences of your judgment call for decades. So why not make the right ones?
Key Benefits Of online professional courses
Online professional courses offer you the flexibility to learn in a more accessible way. For instance, you can catch up on the latest video tutorial while traveling. You can literally design your learning schedule around your day.
The second advantage is that online courses leverage technology and design to make courses highly engaging. You will be learning through high-value byte-sized video content and regular assessments.
The best part, though, is the aspect of community learning alongside other ambitious professionals on a power growth trajectory. Peer-to-peer engagement serves both as motivation as well as an opportunity to network.
Choose a High-Value Critical Thinking Online Course
Critical thinking is a fairly well-developed discipline, despite the fact that it has not made its way to school and college curricula. A critical thinking online course scientifically breaks it down to help learners understand it from a larger perspective, as well as take away actionable steps.
You will learn how to question assumptions, leverage logic while also expanding one’s consciousness, which often tends to be limited.
While tons of data are available, you will learn how to process it critically. You will also learn how to engage constructively with opposing viewpoints and make well-informed decisions based on ground realities rather than biases and assumptions.
Superior courses offer the ladder of inference, which empowers you to understand how people process information. It exposes you to key mental models, the CAFE framework ( a framework to ask relevant questions so you can understand issues with depth), and the Circle of Competence (a framework to identify your strengths and limitations).
A high-value critical thinking online course also has faculty with high expertise and a proven track record in their professions. Their digital footprint will reveal a lot about them.
Last but not the least, because a superior critical thinking online course is a rare breed, it tends to be recognized in the industry by its certification. Check for certified courses offered by a platform with high credibility.
Accelerate your growth
One of the lesser extolled virtues of critical thinkers is that they tend to be more satisfied and often happier. This is because they make judgment calls that result in reduced stress, improved growth prospects, being well-informed, and connecting with people better. Pursuing online professional courses is a great investment in this direction. Typically, you will be investing in about five to seven hours of your adult life span. However, these hours will constructively impact every judgment call you make and its consequences for decades!
