What would change if employability included imagination?
Jen, Thinking Aloud
Founder of TICE
There’s a question I keep coming back to. one that refuses to sit quietly in the corner of my mind:
What would change if employability included imagination?
Not as a fluffy add-on.
Not as a “nice-to-have” line at the bottom of a job description.
But as something expected, valued, and actively evidenced.
I think about this a lot, partly because once upon a time, I discovered there was an Imagineering team at Disney. Not marketers. Not engineers. Imagineers. People whose job was to combine creativity and logic, vision and execution, imagination and structure and make entire worlds real.
If I’d known that was a viable career path when I was younger, I wonder how differently I’d have understood my own way of thinking.
Because I was always creative, I just didn’t have the language for it.
I loved art, but I wasn’t the strongest “artist” in the traditional sense. I could see ideas clearly, make connections, build narratives in my head, but because I couldn’t always express them in the expected way, I quietly assumed that maybe creativity wasn’t really my thing after all.
What I didn’t realise then was that creativity doesn’t only live in outputs.
Sometimes it lives in how you see, how you question, how you connect.
I knew I thought differently. I just didn’t know that difference had value.
And that’s what keeps pulling me back to this question.
Imagination isn’t the opposite of intelligence
Somewhere along the way, imagination became associated with childhood, something we grow out of rather than into. As if serious careers require seriousness of thought only. As if logic and creativity sit on opposite sides of the brain, competing for space.
But real life doesn’t work like that.
A brain surgeon faced with an unexpected complication can’t rely on memorised research alone. A lawyer navigating complex policy landscapes often has to think laterally, creatively, and ethically to find a way forward. Teachers, engineers, planners, and leaders all encounter moments where the rulebook runs out.
Imagination is what fills the gap between what we know and what we don’t yet understand.
It’s not about making things up.
It’s about asking better questions.
Imagination already exists in employability, it’s just constrained
To be fair, employability does already make space for imagination.
Most interviews ask candidates to demonstrate problem-solving using frameworks like the STAR technique. People are regularly praised for “creative thinking” when they’ve navigated a tricky situation, found a workaround, or kept things moving under pressure.
So imagination isn’t absent.
But it’s usually submerged.
It tends to appear after the fact, once the outcome is known, the solution reached, the story neatly packaged. Creativity becomes something you evidence retrospectively, rather than something you’re encouraged to explore openly.
What we don’t often see space for is imagination before certainty.
What if employability didn’t only reward how well someone solved a problem, but also how they approached the unknown?
What if applications invited people to talk about:
how they framed a problem before they knew what it was
which possibilities they explored, tested, or abandoned
what they learned from ideas that didn’t work
That’s a different kind of thinking being surfaced. One that values curiosity, reframing, and intellectual risk, not just efficiency and resolution.
It’s the difference between asking “tell us what you did” and inviting someone to show how they think.
Imagination needs structure, not permission
One of the most useful reframes I’ve come across is in The Imagineering Process by Louis J. Prosperi.
What’s powerful about the imagineering approach is that imagination isn’t treated as chaos or instinct; it’s treated as a process.
It moves through stages: understanding the challenge, generating possibilities, refining ideas, testing, evaluating, and bringing something into the real world.
This matters because it reframes imagination as something you practice, not something you either “have” or “don’t have”.
If employability recognised this more explicitly, imagination would stop feeling risky or vague and start being understood as a disciplined, transferable way of working.
This isn’t about creatives versus everyone else
Imagination doesn’t belong exclusively to the creative industries.
It belongs to anyone navigating complexity. Anyone making decisions with incomplete information. Anyone balancing logic with empathy, knowledge with uncertainty.
When employability sidelines imagination, we risk creating people who are excellent at following instructions but less confident when the script changes.
When we name and value it, we give people permission to think, adapt, and build new paths forward.
So what would actually change?
If employability included imagination, openly and intentionally:
Education would value thinking processes as much as polished outcomes
Young people wouldn’t assume they’re “not creative” just because their creativity doesn’t look one specific way
Careers would feel less like narrow pipelines and more like expandable landscapes
Creative thinking would be recognised as a life skill, not a niche talent
And perhaps most importantly, people would feel trusted to think, not just comply.
I often wonder how different things might have felt if, earlier on, someone had said: your way of thinking matters, even if it doesn’t fit the template yet.
Maybe that’s why this question won’t leave me alone.
Because in a world that’s increasingly complex and uncertain, imagination isn’t a distraction from employability.
It might be the thing that makes it possible in the first place.
References
Amabile, T.M. (1996) Creativity in Context. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Craft, A. (2005) Creativity in Schools: Tensions and Dilemmas. London: Routledge.
Florida, R. (2014) The Rise of the Creative Class – Revisited. New York: Basic Books.
Lucas, B. and Spencer, E. (2017) Teaching Creative Thinking: Developing Learners Who Generate Ideas and Can Think Critically. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.
OECD (2019) OECD Future of Education and Skills 2030: OECD Learning Compass 2030. Paris: OECD Publishing.
Prosperi, L.J. (2012) The Imagineering Process: Seven Steps to Transforming Ideas into Reality. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Robinson, K. (2011) Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. 2nd edn. Chichester: Capstone Publishing.
World Economic Forum (2023) The Future of Jobs Report. Geneva: World Economic Forum.