Problem solving
Did you put “problem solving” among your skills on the CV? Let’s put your abilities to test.
Our ability to reason is at the heart of most of the jobs we do over our professional career.In a company like ours, mainly made of IT developers, we’re constantly searching for profiles with passion for their work, technical knowledge, but most of all the ability of thinking outside the box and solve problems. Many summarize these skills with the words problem solvingon their CV.
Quite often among our professional characteristics we write qualities like lateral thinking, team building or problem solving. When you’ll need to fix a bug, develop an algorithm or a new functionality, you’ll have to demonstrate that you really have those abilities.
Thinking emerges even in the easiest problems or in the answers to banal questions. In all of those situations where what really matters is not the solution but the way you get there. In these moments you can see if a person is able to think fast and efficiently.
How many cats are there in Rome? Try to answer and then keep reading the article.
Unless you work at the Census Bureau for cats in Rome, it’s unlikely you know the right answer. Everyone of us, however, has the information we need to get to a realistic estimate.
How many cats do you have? How big is your family? How many of your friends have a cat? What’s the ratio between your friends’ cats and the amount of friends you have? How many apartments does your building have? How many people live in an apartment on average? How many of these families have a cat?
Comparing these numbers to the number of people who live in Rome you’ll get to a plausible answer. And this is not the only way to solve this kind of questions.
If you prove you can find efficient andprecise answers, search for alternative roads to solve problems and you don’t give up, then you’ll be considered interesting people.
You’ll be able to face boolean variables, metadata, algorithms and framework.
On the other hand, if you think you don’t have these qualities, don’t worry. Like any other skills, these too can be trained and improved.
What matters is being ready when the right time comes.
