[Creativity/Innovation]

Creativity and innovation are obvious and common requests in job advertisements. But they are a little esoteric when trying to demonstrate evidence of them.

For example, developing a new way to display data isn’t attention-getting “wow” creativity, but look into how data was presented (poorly) for the Challenger O-Ring decision-makers, and we can see how important thinking creatively can be.

And we forget that innovation usually includes quite a few failures before the headline-grabbing “Success!”. Those previous failures can be costly, both monetarily and mentally.

Creativity and innovation are elements of technical proficiency competence, and thriving professional engineers embrace them.