CREATIVITY, TEAMWORK AND PROBLEM SOLVING IN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS. RELATIONSHIP WITH CHOICE OF PRE-UNIVERSITY MAJOR

The unemployment crisis is a major problem in many countries, and particularly in Spain. Nevertheless, for a long time now the managerial sector has been showing great difficulties to find university graduates that meet their talent demands, since the new wave of professionals has shortcomings in what is known as soft skills or social skills. Social skills are a combination of problemsolving, teamwork, leadership, creativity and empathy skills, which are essential tools for graduates wishing to integrate successfully into the current labour market. Despite the fact that these abilities should be trained and encouraged from pre-university stages, the reality is that they are under-represented in most secondary education curricula. This paper describes the first approach to studying the relation between proficiency in different kinds of soft skills among high school students, and the type of university education choices they make. To this end, we analysed the extent to which a sample of high school students from seven secondary education centres in the Region of Madrid mastered creativity, teamwork and problem solving skills. The method used to assess said skills is based on statistical analysis of student responses to specific questionnaires. On-line and in-class psychometric tests from eCompetentis project have been used (after validation in Spanish) to appraise the students' ability to work as part of a team and solve problems. For creativity, we used TestMyCreativity, an on-line, open-access test developed by a team of company recruiters. The main results suggest that high school students are good at teamwork, have average-to-high problem-solving skills, and relatively high creativity. There are small differences between students depending on the major they choose to take in their pre-university studies. For instance, it seems like those who choose technology-related majors are the least creative, and their curiosity and abstraction levels are significantly lower than among other students. At the same time, they are slightly better team players, and excellent when it comes to planning. These students are usually not very good at problem solving, and are more impulsive than those who pick other specialities. Social sciences students are more creative and better at problem solving, while humanities students are just the opposite. Upon first data examination, it appeared that acquisition of these skills in different ways is what determines the existence of several profiles; however, said profiles do not exactly correspond to the type of major chosen by students. It would therefore be very interesting to increase our study sample and expand our research into more diverse and numerous groups of high school students.