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.