Abstract
Transversal skills, such as complex problem solving (CPS) are viewed as central twenty-first-century skills. Recent empirical findings have already supported the importance of CPS for early academic advancement. We wanted to determine whether CPS could also contribute to the understanding of career advancement later in life. Towards this end, we conducted a study (n = 245) at a large German automobile company in which we predicted career advancement and related criteria with CPS in addition to general mental ability (GMA). A computer-based assessment served as a measure of CPS. The dependent variables were the participants’ job level in accordance with the international standard classification for occupations (ISCO-08) and the number of professional training days as a proxy for lifelong learning efforts. The data were analysed using a structural equation modelling approach. CPS and GMA showed correlations (from .18 to .26, p < .01) with indicators of career advancement. All regression models showed good fit and indicated that CPS explained incremental variance in one of two indicators (β was .14 for trainings, p < .05). Our findings suggest an increment of CPS for predicting career advancement beyond GMA. Hence, CPS could complement GMA in methodologies for the study of professional development.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the TBA group at DIPF (http://tba.dipf.de) for providing the authoring tool CBA Item Builder and technical support. We would like to express our gratitude to Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen, Germany, and in particular to Prof. Dr. Peer Ederer for providing the contact to the participating enterprises, for giving valuable support in data collection, and for making the data available to us. Also of indispensable support in data collection and data preparation was Dr. Sascha Wüstenberg of the University of Luxembourg.
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Notes on contributors
Jakob Mainert
Jakob Mainert is research assistant and PhD student at University of Luxembourg since Sept. 2013. He is member of the psychometricians’ team responsible for the assessment of complex problem-solving skills led by ATTRACT research fellow Dr Samuel Greiff.
André Kretzschmar
André Kretzschmar is research assistant and PhD student at the University of Luxembourg since 2012. He is member of the psychometricians’ team responsible for the assessment of complex problem-solving skills led by ATTRACT research fellow Dr Samuel Greiff.
Jonas C. Neubert
Jonas Neubert is research assistant at Brandenburg University of Technology [since 2015] and PhD student at University of Luxembourg since 2012.
Samuel Greiff
Samuel Greiff is research group leader principal investigator, and ATTRACT fellow at University of Luxembourg. He holds a PhD in cognitive and experimental psychology from the University of Heidelberg (passed with distinction).