# What Are Thinking Skills? The Meaning, the Five Types, and How to Build Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/thinking-skills-meaning/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/thinking-skills-meaning.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving decision-making at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Thinking skills are the mental processes you use to work with information. See what the term means, the five main types, and how each shows up at work. ## Key facts - Title: What Are Thinking Skills? The Meaning, the Five Types, and How to Build Them - Category: Types of Skills - Primary skill: Decision-Making - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Building Resilience - Primary keyword: thinking skills meaning - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/thinking-skills-meaning/ ## What this page covers - Thinking skills are the mental processes you use to work with information. See what the term means, the five main types, and how each shows up at work. - Practical guidance for thinking skills meaning - How this topic connects to Decision-Making ## Detailed explanation Thinking skills are the mental processes you use to work with information rather than simply remember it: judging whether a claim holds up, breaking a problem into parts, [coming up with alternatives](/knowledge/decision-making/divergent-thinking/), solving problems, making decisions and keeping an eye on your own reasoning. The term covers a family of related skills, not one single ability. The phrase tends to appear in a course outline, a job ad or a performance review with no explanation attached, which makes it hard to tell what is being asked of you, or whether you measure up. Each of these processes has a recognizable shape in everyday work, though, and none of them is fixed. ## The meaning of thinking skills The NSW Department of Education describes thinking skills as a set of higher-order thinking processes: [critical thinking](/knowledge/decision-making/critical-thinking/), creative thinking, [problem-solving](/knowledge/types-of-skills/problem-solver-skill/), decision-making and metacognition, which it explains as understanding how we think. What that definition makes clear is that thinking skills are not an amount of knowledge or a single score. They are things you do with information, and they are distinct enough that being strong in one does not make you strong in all of them. Do not expect a tidier definition than that. Even critical thinking on its own is defined in several ways, and no single definition captures all of it. That matters less than it sounds. You do not need to memorize the correct wording. You need to recognize the processes when you, or someone around you, are using them. ## Lower-order and higher-order thinking A second distinction explains what the phrase usually points to. The revised version of Bloom's taxonomy, a widely used way of classifying learning, separates lower-order thinking (remembering, understanding and applying) from higher-order thinking (analyzing, evaluating and creating). The lower tier relies mainly on recall and recognition. The higher tier asks you to do something with the information and produce something that was not there before: a comparison, a judgment, a solution. When a course, an employer or a manager asks for thinking skills, it is almost always the higher tier they have in mind. Knowing every figure in a report is the lower tier. Noticing the one figure that does not fit, working out why, and saying what should change as a result is the higher tier, and it is the part of your thinking other people actually get to see. ## The five main types of thinking skills The five types below overlap in practice, but each does a different job. Two of them judge and take apart information, one widens the options, one applies all of that to a real situation, and one keeps watch over the thinking itself. ### Critical thinking Critical thinking is evaluating information, claims and arguments to judge whether they hold up before you accept them. Its defining feature is that it slows you down: it stops the first answer from becoming the final one. At work it rarely looks like debate. It looks like checking where a figure came from before it goes into a slide, asking what a plan assumes about the budget, or noticing that an argument skips a step. For someone new, the everyday form of critical thinking is asking questions instead of nodding along. One of the young people we interviewed about starting work was blunt about it. The wording is our notes of what she told us rather than a transcript: > Be critical. Don't just say 'yes, thanks' and 'OK' — ask questions, and question things. It really isn't that dangerous. Watch out for too much humility and deference to authority. Asking is taken positively, even if the answer is no. And ask even when it's outside your area of expertise — it gives you insight. A question asked at the right moment does the job of a careful review, only earlier and more cheaply: it catches a shaky assumption before anything gets built on top of it. ### Analytical thinking Analytical thinking is breaking information or a problem into smaller parts so you can draw conclusions from them. Where critical thinking judges the whole, analytical thinking takes it apart. It is what turns a vague assignment like "find out why complaints went up" into questions you can actually answer: which complaints, since when, about what, and from whom. The conclusion comes at the end, built from the parts, instead of as a guess at the start. ### Creative thinking Creative thinking is the generative side of thinking skills. Its components include sensitivity to problems, flexibility, originality and elaboration: noticing that something is a problem in the first place, switching approach when one stalls, coming up with an idea that is genuinely new, and developing a rough idea into something usable. Critical thinking narrows the options; creative thinking widens them. So thinking well is not only about being right. It is also about seeing that there is more than one way into the problem in front of you. ### Problem-solving and decision-making Problem-solving and decision-making are where the other processes meet a real situation. Understanding the problem draws on analysis, generating options draws on creativity, and choosing between them draws on evaluation. That is why thinking skills are rarely tested in isolation at work. Nobody asks you to demonstrate critical thinking in the abstract. People see it in the quality of the decisions you make and the solutions you propose, and in how you got there. ### Metacognition Metacognition is thinking about your own thinking, and it has two parts. Metacognitive knowledge is knowing your own strategies, strengths and tendencies: that you rush when a deadline is close, say, or tend to trust the first source you find. Metacognitive regulation is planning, monitoring and assessing how you go about a task. Together they support every other type. They help you plan how to approach a problem, check whether you really understand it, and change course when an approach is not working. It is the most personal of the five, because it comes down to noticing when your own reasoning has drifted off track, ideally before anyone else does. ## Can thinking skills be learned? Yes, and education systems are built on that assumption. British Columbia's curriculum treats Thinking as a core competency, covering the knowledge, skills and processes associated with intellectual development, and the NSW Department of Education treats thinking skills as something teaching should build. A competency in a curriculum is, by design, something people develop through instruction and practice. If good thinking feels like a talent other people were simply born with, that is the practical answer: the people whose job is to teach it treat it as trainable. Practice works best as small, repeatable moves rather than a course in logic. Before you accept a conclusion, ask what it rests on. Before you settle on an option, make yourself find one more. After finishing a task, take two minutes to note [what you would do differently](/knowledge/self-awareness/self-reflection/) next time. Each move exercises one of the five types, and each fits into a lecture, a student job or a first role. ## How to show thinking skills at work and in applications Research, analysis and a well-structured paper all draw on real thinking skills, but an employer cannot see them in a grade. What makes them visible is a concrete example told as a sequence: the situation, the thinking move you made, and what happened as a result. "I noticed the survey only covered one group, raised it, and we widened the sample before the report went out" says more than any adjective on a résumé. Match the example to the type the role asks for. An ad that mentions analytical skills wants to hear how you broke something down; one that mentions problem-solving wants to hear how you got from a messy situation to a decision. If examples are hard to come by, it helps to know which of your workplace skills are strongest, because that is where the examples usually are. It takes a few minutes to [map your work skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), and anything that comes out weaker is something to practice, not a verdict. ## What keeps your thinking sound when work tests it Look back across the five types and a pattern appears. Each is manageable at a desk with time to spare. Each gets harder at the moments work actually puts it to the test: when a choice has to be made, when your own assumptions are part of the problem, and when you are under pressure. **Decision-Making** is where thinking skills become visible at work: choosing which option to back, which information to trust and when to act on an incomplete picture. It rests on a few habits. Use data and hard facts, get another opinion from someone experienced (even someone who disagrees), slow down when you feel rushed or emotional, and accept good enough rather than waiting for perfect. It also means knowing the traps: looking only for what confirms your view, anchoring on the first number you hear, overconfidence, and sticking with a choice because of what you have already put into it. **Building Self-Awareness** turns metacognition from an exam term into a check you can run on yourself at work. It starts with recognizing the biases that color how you read people and situations, and the deeper iceberg beliefs about achievement, acceptance or control that can push you into an overreaction before you have thought anything through. Feedback does the rest. Asking people who have seen your work for specific, forward-looking advice exposes blind spots in your reasoning that reflection alone tends to miss. **Building Resilience** matters because your thinking is tested hardest when you are stressed, criticized or worried. Something happens, an automatic thought follows, and you react, often before checking whether the thought was accurate. Resilience is the habit of catching that thought and questioning it: spotting thinking errors such as filtering, jumping to conclusions, mind reading or all-or-nothing thinking, asking what you would tell a friend in the same spot, and looking for another explanation. Clear thinking is partly the discipline of not trusting your first interpretation. You do not have to guess which of these three is your weak spot. The **free Job Skills Test** can [show you where to start](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), placing these three within **a wider set of twelve work skills**, and each of them can be built with practice, whatever your score is today. ## Thinking well is built in ordinary moments Some of this may already be familiar from your own work or studies. If you have ever reread an assignment brief because one line in it did not add up, and asked about it before starting, you were using critical thinking and metacognition together, without calling it either. None of the five types, and none of the three skills behind them, is a fixed part of who you are. Each is a set of habits you can build in your own way, starting with whichever would make the most difference to you right now. And as more of your work turns into decisions other people rely on, those habits carry more weight, which makes now a good time to find out where you stand. ## Find your starting point What remains is one small step. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the skills you rely on at work. In 7 minutes it gives you a score on each of the twelve skills that shape how you manage yourself and work with others, the three above among them, and shows which ones would make the biggest difference for you. **[Discover my skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes 7 minutes, results shown instantly.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Thinking skills are the mental processes you use to work with information. See what the term means, the five main types, and how each shows up at work. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Decision-Making. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Building Resilience. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/decision-making.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/resilience.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/types-of-skills/thinking-skills-meaning/ Preferred summary: "Thinking skills are the mental processes you use to work with information. See what the term means, the five main types, and how each shows up at work." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.