Dirges for Degrees? Not So Fast.
What if conventional wisdom is not wise?
I know some amazing humans who don’t have degrees and are successful professionals. A self-taught graphic designer who has directed global brand strategies at publicly traded companies. A drummer who chose world tours with his band over college, and is now North American Director of Product for an apparel brand you probably know. A high school dropout turned startup kid whose company likely has hardware in your nearest schoolhouse.
Most people reading this probably have similar stories of people thriving despite not having postsecondary credentials.
For several years now, there has been an assault on degrees. Often based on personal observations of friends and acquaintances who are successful and don’t have a degree, conventional wisdom seems to have reached a consensus decision that, despite evidence to the contrary, “you don’t really need a degree anymore.”
The emergence of the Skills-Based Hiring movement has added a new wrinkle to seemingly cement these assumptions about the futility of formal post-secondary educational attainment.
Skills-Based Hiring
A lot goes into Skills-Based Hiring practices, however much attention seems focused on one key characteristic: doing away with degree requirements in job postings. And with as many as half of employers already shifting in this direction, plus a third of U.S. states now requiring (either by legislation or executive order) that most state jobs be shifted to Skills-Based Hiring models, conventional wisdom seems to have decided that this will hasten the death of the degrees.
Skills attainment is about skills attainment, not the domain of the proving grounds where the skills were attained.
But what if conventional wisdom is not wise? What if these new trends actually function to increase the value of formal educational attainment?
To get there, let us first understand a key to skills-based hiring: the point of moving away from degree requirements is not to do away with degrees. Rather, this practice is about doing away with using degrees as imprecise proxies for the skills that hiring managers seek.
Instead of requiring a degree in X because we assume someone with that degree has Skills A, B, and C, this movement is about transparently requiring Skills A, B, and C in the job listing.
Learners will have a competitive advantage in the job marketplace not because they have a degree, but because they have trusted credentials that tell the stories about the skills they acquired as a part of that degree.
One compelling reason to support this practice is because it correctly acknowledges that skills attainment is about skills attainment, not the domain of the proving grounds where the skills were attained.
Many enrollment management and registrar professionals will already be nodding their heads along with this notion, as we are familiar with supporting our students such as those who served in the military, transfer students, and those who take advantage of Prior Learning Assessments; we know that they have attained skills and competencies that we can value and officially recognize as we welcome them to campus.
Skills-Based Hiring seeks to broadly expand such valuable recognition into hiring practices that will expand access to opportunities for most learners/earners.
Replacing degree requirements with skills requirements offers a path to move away from perpetuating harmful employment practices while enabling life-changing economic mobility.
Especially in a moment when many positions are difficult to fill (in Colorado, where I live, around 20% of state jobs are going unfilled), there is a nexus between the needs of hiring bodies and the needs of people who are seeking better opportunities for earning and career growth. As the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia concluded in the Exploring a Skills-Based Approach to Occupational Mobility report:
“For nearly half of the lower-wage employment analyzed, we identify at least one higher-paying occupation requiring similar skills in the same metro area. We also find that transitions to similar higher-paying occupations would represent an average annual increase in wages of nearly $15,000, or 49 percent” (2020).
In other words, employers are denying themselves a broader talent pool of qualified workers, while potentially qualified job seekers are being excluded from even being considered for jobs because of degree requirements in hiring. Replacing degree requirements with skills requirements expands talent pools for employers, and offers a path to move away from perpetuating harmful employment practices while enabling life-changing economic mobility.
Employers win! Job seekers win! Tough to argue that this is anything other than a righteous direction for us to be moving, right?
Well actually…
Despite the benefits to some stakeholders, many share the perspective that this movement stands in opposition to the welfare and self-interest of most colleges and universities, and that a logical consequence of ditching degree requirements will be the downfall of the degree itself.
This assumption that the movement away from degree requirements is cause for us to start planning dirges for degrees is however, something to critically question.
After all, nobody is claiming that Skills-Based Hiring is some flipped bias approach to hiring in which interviews are granted to everyone except those with the degrees. Implementing hiring practices that explicitly name the desired skills (rather than using proxies for those skills) still require employers to vet applicants and discover job seekers who have those desired skills.
Nothing about this signals an assault on degrees, much less an inherent degradation of degrees. While Skills-Based Hiring increases opportunity access for all, it could also lead to enhancing the privileges enjoyed by degrees and other post-secondary credentials more than ever.
As job seekers apply for jobs in a Skills-Based Hiring landscape, some will be effectively raising their hands to say, “Trust me, I have those skills,” while others will be pointing to official records from trade schools, colleges and universities, saying, “Trust them, they assert that I have those skills.”
Which job seekers will have the competitive advantage: those self-asserting their skills or those presenting credentials asserting that trusted institutions have validated their skills?
And this is where our roles and responsibilities with regard to Learning Mobility intersect with the promise of economic mobility and Skills-Based Hiring. Innovative credentials and practices made possible by the metadata when issuing digital credentials create the opportunity for colleges and universities to contextualize our credentials beyond the names of the academic programs.
This why there is such enthusiasm for digital badges, Learning & Employment Records (LERs), digital diplomas and other innovative credentials. Our credentials can serve as valuable, trusted tools for both recognition and storytelling.
While Skills-Based Hiring increases opportunity access for all, it likely also leads to enhancing the privileges enjoyed by degrees and other post-secondary credentials more than ever.
Simply put: we have the ability to issue credentials that are explicit about what they are credentialing.
We can take out the guess work and replace it with credential transparency, effectively uptexting credentials like degrees with recognition and storytelling that include data such as program descriptions, skills tagging, earning criteria and learning outcomes, and even alignment to industry standards and competency frameworks.
In other words, we can share deeper and richer narratives about our credentials — and do so in machine-readable ways! — such that Skills-Based Hiring leads to our learners having a competitive advantage in the opportunity marketplace.
Aside: this point of storytelling is also an opportunity to address the common concern that proliferation of recognition through credentials will generally devalue credentials writ large. As Meena Naik stated in her brilliant post: “We must shift our mindsets: more credentials does not dilute the value or importance of formal education credentials. Instead, it empowers individuals to tell their holistic stories.”
In this regard, the naysayers are correct that “you don’t need a degree” to get hired. In a competitive hiring landscape in which employers need trusted ways to match the skills required for a job with people who have those skills, graduates will have the edge not because they have degrees, but because they have trusted credentials that tell the stories about the skills they acquired as a part of their degrees.
If conventional wisdom is that Skills-Based Hiring is going to be the death of the degree, count me among those predicting that conventional wisdom will not prove to be wise.
Thanks for reading. If you liked this post, please click to 👏👏👏 and recommend it to others! If you have thoughts to share about this, I hope to learn from your own response post!
In addition to following Noah Geisel here on Medium, you can find him on LinkedIn. Some other posts you might like:
