Critical thinking is one of the ten “essential skills” in the Worker Requirements of O*NET, the US government's primary source of occupational information. The database profiles more than 900 occupations, such as “Registered Nurses”, which between them cover more than 54,000 job titles across the US economy.
Here, we dig into the O*NET data to see how critical thinking matters for jobs.
For each occupation, O*NET measures importance and level of relevant skills:
Importance indicates how important a particular skill is to the occupation, ranging from “Not Important” (1) to “Extremely Important” (5).
Level indicates how much of a particular skill the occupation needs, on a 0–7 scale.
Critical thinking matters to 89% of the occupations. By “matters”, we mean it is rated as “important” (3) or more. Only two other essential skills (Active Listening and Speaking) matter to more occupations. See a comparison chart below.
Share of occupations that rate each skill important or more
O*NET's ten essential skills, 910 occupations. Importance 3 (“important”) or higher on the 1–5 scale.
Try it: Maths is rated important in only 26% of occupations. So does maths matter less than critical thinking?
Importance says whether a job needs critical thinking; level says how much. As you'd expect, these two metrics are highly correlated. In general, the more important critical thinking is to a job, the higher level of it is required too. See the scatterplot below.
Every occupation by how important critical thinking is to it, and how much it needs
Importance on the 1–5 scale, level on the 0–7 scale. Hover a dot to see its occupations.
They do measure, however, different aspects of a job's requirements. For example, focus on the coloured vertical line in the graph: it marks the 107 occupations where critical thinking is rated at the same importance (3.88). The level of critical thinking required ranges from 3.12 (Hydroelectric plant technicians) to 4.62 (Civil engineers). In other words, all these occupations lean on critical thinking just as much, but the level of critical thinking required is the highest for civil engineers (tied with bioengineers).
Search any of the 910 occupations, by its name or a job title it covers. The names are American and the training described is the US route, so your country may train for the same job differently.
No job matches that. The names are US job titles, so try a more formal one ("physician" rather than "doctor").
Considerable preparation: usually a four-year degree.
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