Getting Hired Without a 4-Year College Degree May Be Getting Easier

Used to be that most advertisements for “good” jobs started with the requirement of a 4-year college degree. That may be changing, due in part to the tight job market and in part to the realization that a degree does not necessarily translate into job-appropriate skills.

 

A recent report from the Burning Glass Institute looked at over 50 million job postings in the past few years to see whether the hiring prerequisite of a 4-year degree was changing over time. They found that more companies are dropping the degree requirement all the time, and instead are outlining the specific skills that a desirable employee must possess. Technical skills and soft skills (communication, inter-personal relations). The report concludes that “we project that an additional 1.4 million jobs could open to workers without college degrees over the next five years.”

 

The Rework America Business Network consists of 12 major companies (like Microsoft, AT&T, Walmart, Toyota) who gathered together in 2018 to “seek to deepen their talent pools of qualified candidates and expand opportunities for people of diverse backgrounds by recruiting and hiring with a focus on individuals’ skills. … [T]his means emphasizing an individual’s demonstrable skills, over other proxies of one’s capabilities such as education, experience, references or pedigree, in all aspects of the employment cycle from sourcing and hiring to training, evaluation, advancement and retention to workforce planning.”

 

Google (not a member of the Rework America Business Network) has recently announced a $100 million fund to help train potential new employees. Its fund is targeting the two-thirds of American workers who do not have a four-year college degree. Some of the fund’s money will be given to non-profits to provide training in technical skills using Google’s existing career certificate curriculum in information technology. The other portion of the fund will provide loans to students to acquire needed technical skills; the loans will be repayable at no interest in $100/month increments, provided the student obtains a job earning at least $40,000/year.

 

This trend in hiring opens up so many possibilities for acquiring the necessary skills: community college (less than 2 years in person), less than 2 years online, certificate programs, apprenticeships.

Teaching Classes in Virtual Reality (VR)

 

My personal experience with online classes is via a-synchronous pre-recorded video and pdf documents or synchronous sessions using zoom or a similar platform. There is now an up-and-coming trend of offering online classes using virtual reality (VR) technology.

 

Of course, there have been university-level classes about virtual reality for quite some time (about the VR technology itself). But I’m talking about classes that are hosted in virtual reality (using VR technology, but possibly about some unrelated subject matter).

 

The Virtual People course offered by Stanford University is one of the first courses to be offered completely in virtual reality. Offered by the Communications Department for graduate students from multiple disciplines, the course curriculum is described as follows: “the concept of virtual people or digital human representations; methods of constructing and using virtual people; methodological approaches to interactions with and among virtual people; and current applications. Viewpoints including popular culture, literature, film, engineering, behavioral science, computer science, and communication.” All interactions between faculty and class students throughout the entire semester take place via VR.

 

Students have found the VR format provides a broader type of learning, allowing them to develop empathy by virtually standing in others’ shoes and participate in different life experiences. One guest speaker in the Stanford course “teaches racial empathy by having the viewer experience life as a black man who encounters racial prejudice.”

 

A study of student experiences in VR classes has found that students with previous VR experience benefit most from this class format. Students who are less comfortable with the VR format reported physical discomfort and distraction from the actual learning experience. Seems to me that this problem could be addressed with some VR format training/learning before the substantive class presentation sessions start.

 

As Covid has changed the way education is provided, more schools are incorporating VR into their curriculum offerings. And some, like VictoryXR Academy, offer much of their curriculum via VR.

 

Interested in incorporating VR into your own online teaching? Find VR curriculum resources here, here and here.