Creative Thinking as a Relevant Element for Industry 4.0 Professionals. A Study in Mexican University Students

The purpose of this article is to present the results of an exploratory analysis of the level of perceived achievement of the complex thinking competency in a group of engineering students in their last semester at a university in Western Mexico. Its intention is to identify whether this population has the necessary skills to be able to meet challenges and solve problems related to the demands of their future professional environments. Specifically, it seeks to identify their level in the meta-competency of creative or innovative thinking, considering it a valuable skill for Industry 4.0. Methodologically, a descriptive statistical analysis focused on arithmetic means, standard deviations, boxplot, principal components and biplot has been performed. In conclusion, and from the results, it is possible to appreciate that sufficient data were found to confirm that the participants show a high level of perception of creative thinking performance, making them more suitable to the contemporary challenges that Industry 4.0 implies for their professions.