Dealing with problems is a part of life. People are faced with them every day. Some large, some small. From relatively simple problems like ‘what route do you take to work to get around traffic?’ or ‘How do you fix the copy machine?’ to complex, world-changing problems like global-warming and homelessness, the strength of your problem-solving skill-set can either make or break your career.

Colleges and companies alike are increasingly looking beyond grades, essays, and interview questions to determine who they admit or hire to be a part of their team. Research from the Society for Human Resource Management in 2016 found that employers actually care more about soft skills than they do technical abilities like reading comprehension and mathematics. And the international hiring firm Monster notes that, “you can be the best at what you do, but if your soft skills aren’t cutting it, you’re limiting your chances of career success.”

Monster lists seven critical soft skills that every job applicant should have firmly under their belt to be the most sought after candidate. Chief among these is critical thinking and problem-solving. Companies want to know that you are able to take action when something goes wrong. Companies rely on problem solvers to navigate unexpected challenges.

So how do you demonstrate your problem solving abilities? It has to go beyond just showing good grades. You have to be able to highlight real situations where you have taken it upon yourself to identify and solve hard problems critical to the success of a project.

One of the best ways to do this is through academic competitions. For starters, competitions help to demonstrate that you can learn and grow from your failures. Managing failure itself is critical component to having a successful career in today’s high-tech, fast-paced workforce. We all know that yes, failing sucks, but sometimes you need to fail 100 times before you can identify how to finally succeed!

Additionally, many competitions are specifically designed to help you strengthen your problem-solving mindset, and test your skills in various creative problem solving techniques. The world’s best problem solvers don’t just go about it without a plan. They know how to break down complex problems and get to the core issues. They have tools and skills to help analyze the wide variety of problems they may face.

For those who want to strengthen their problem solving skills there are programs that can help. Specifically, the academic competitions with a direct focus on problem solving can provide a very clear path to creating a rock-solid toolbox of your own so that when your next college or career application comes around, you’ll be ready.

Check out these three competitions to get a start on improving your own problem solving skills for your future!

 

 

Modeling the Future

The Modelling the Future competition doesn’t ask high school juniors and seniors to come up with an invention that can change the world. Anyone with an imagination can do that. No, it wants them to take a given cutting-edge technology or industry as specified by the competition and describe how it could change the world.

For example, the current topic is autonomous vehicles. The technology has only existed for a couple of years, so the extent to which it can be applied in the transportation industry alone has yet to be realized. The competition wants students to express how autonomous vehicles can affect the transportation industry via mathematical models.

But the competition doesn’t want students to stop with the obvious. It wants to know how they will affect healthcare, the insurance industry, education, our communities in general, etc.

Picture autonomous vehicles as a rock thrown in a pond that creates ripples in the water. The competition wants students to describe those ripples with mathematical models.

 

 

Future City Competition

Open to only middle school students (sixth, seventh, and eighth grades), Future City gives some of the brightest young minds in the country a chance to shine.

It all begins with a fundamental, abstract question that can be answered in many different ways—how can we make the world a better place? To answer that question participants are tasked with designing and building a city of the future. They must imagine what a city could look like a century from now and include a solution to a citywide sustainability problem (i.e. storm water management, urban agriculture, green energy, etc.).

Participants will have four months to imagine, design, and build their city. In the end, they will be graded on five deliverables:

• Virtual city design: using SimCity software they must design their city and present in a slide show how it progressed to the end goal.
• City Essay: students will have to write a 1500-word essay describing what is unique about their city and how it solves a particular citywide challenge as designated by the competition.
• City Model: build a scale model of a section of their city using recyclable materials and including at least one moving part.
• City Presentation: students will give a seven-minute presentation on the unique features of their city and how it solves the citywide challenge.
• Project Plan: tasks of this magnitude require careful planning, Judges want to see how students planned to stay focused and organized so they could get the project completed.

 

Future Problem-Solving Program

The problems facing the world are not unique to any one age group or country. It stands to reason that the solutions for them could come from anywhere in the world and from someone who has yet to realize or express his/her full potential. The Future Problem-Solving Program gives kids of all ages (elementary school, middle school, and high school) from all over the world a chance to do just that.

The competition is broken up into four segments:

• Community Problem Solvers
• Global Issues Problem Solving
• Scenario Writing
• Scenario Performance

Community problem solvers are challenged to take a problematic situation, gather any and all pertinent data related to it to ensure it is understood, analyze it, and develop possible solutions. Part of the challenge is to not only come up with how to solve the problem but to factor in how to implement it.

Those taking part in the Global Issues Problem Solving component will work in teams or as an individual analyzing a series of global topics provided by the competition. They are then tasked with coming up with a six-step problem-solving process. Participants are then challenged to apply their solution in a segment of the competition referred to as ‘Future Scene.’

Scenario Writing and Performance give students an outlet to express their creative side. For Writing, they are asked to write a short story describing the world at least 20 years in the future and how they imagine one of the five topics of the year developing worldwide. Performance asks them to do the same thing, but rather than write a story they tell it in a four to five-minute presentation (no props).