Employers across a range of industries are dropping a job requirement once considered a ticket to a higher paying job and financial security: a college degree.
Today’s tight labor market has led more companies instead to take a more skills-based approach to hiring, as evidenced on job search sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter.
“Part of it is employers realizing they may be able to do a better job finding the right talent by looking for the skills or competencies someone needs to do the job and not letting a degree get in the way of that,” Parisa Fatehi-Weeks, senior director of environmental, social and governance (ESG) for hiring platform Indeed told CBS MoneyWatch.
Wait, you mean to tell me that a $100k piece of paper doesn’t instantly make you the most desirable candidate for a position? Who could have possibly predicted that…
I’ve worked with some horribly incompetent phds (and some excellent ones), the paper alone only tells you they managed to finance and dedicate years to something, not that they have strong skills.
This is so true. However, I have worked with some amazing employees that only had a GED equivalent as well (and some bad ones).
People anywhere are people anywhere.
Yet another reason to justify lower wages. This is right up there with “unskilled labor”.
This is exactly my suspicion. “Not enough workers!” (willing to slave away for poverty wages), so now they’re gambling that they can just hire and train anyone (and meet their arbitrary wage goals). May these businesses cease to exist.
My employer falls under one of these companies that used to require a degree for every position and has now relaxed that and they do pay several pay grades less along with hiring a bunch of temps instead of official employees.
Not every job entry needed inflated experience/education requirements in the first place. It wastes everyone’s time and effort.
Does anyone check? I’ve Costanzaed my way into a couple of jobs that asked for college degree. Nobody ever asked me to prove it, I just did the job as asked and nobody thought twice.
My college actually closed for a few years and it didn’t have any effect on my job-seeking. I’ve also asked my three references if any prospective employer has ever contacted them and nope. For that matter, I’m a programmer and most of the jobs I’ve had required a Computer Science degree, which I don’t have. I’ve often mused about what sort of outrageous bullshit I could get away with on my CV; these stories of high-up people eventually getting fired for fraudulent resumes surprise me not at all.
I find jobs with IT it really matters what you’ve done on your own or previous jobs. I don’t have a degree, but I’ve setup piholes, truenas, Microsoft servers, dabble in Linux, have ubiquiti firewalls and waps, had Cisco equipment, have done a little of everything, firewalls, nas storage, etc. I have certs, and if you ask me how to do something I won’t hesitate to show you what I’d do or tell you I’d have to look it up. It’s not programming, but knowing larger pictures and scenarios really helps and you know “what” needs to be done, it just may be different on meraki vs ubiquiti vs Netgear equipment.
Yup, I realized this during my last semester in my IT degree. Degree doesn’t matter if you have certs and experience. Plus, nothing I learned in my degree has actually been useful in my job besides some programming courses.
it just may be different on Meraki vs ubiquiti vs Netgear
So much, this. Sonicwall certification is rote memorization of the UI.
Don’t get me started on sonicwall. Many of my clients use the tz series and I had no idea how to use them when I started. Can’t override static IP if it’s in a defined scope? Lol that’s crazy.
Both my last background checks “checked”. You could see the status page where they were along the process and it had a green check after a few days. What that actually means, who knows.
Requiring a degree should come with a minimum pay. Perhaps $30 per hr for a bachelor and $40 for a masters.
I have seriously seen 50k jobs requiring a Master’s. I have made well over that in the last 15 years with just an Associate’s. That I just got. In the same field.
Companies are stupid if they think anyone is going to apply there.
I believe teaching usually requires a Masters
It does! They should get paid more. But capitalism.
In college, yes, but most places require a bachelor’s and a teaching certificate.
There are places that don’t require a Masters to get a teaching certificate? I mean, sure there are temporary exceptions for new teachers and a testing process for career changes, but by and large teaching requires a Masters
My state’s department of education describes a Bachelors, and standardized tests as minimum requirements, but then goes on to say that is “preliminary certification “, and you must complete your Masters or equivalent during that limited period. (And as a practical consideration you’ll find it much harder to get a job)
Those some low wages for jobs requiring degrees.
I am not saying those are the correct rates. As a floor they probably should be low. Rates should vary by area anyway. Perhaps as a percentage of median apartment or home rent?
But here in rural America I have seen plenty of jobs that require degrees that pay less than that.
$30 an hour is in the 70th percentile of median income, and $40 an hour is in the 80th.
The median worker with a Bachelor’s degree makes about $27 an hour.
I get that it’s more than the majority of people make. I just still think it’s too low. Everybody making less than $400k should be making more.
I’m all for higher wages, but $400k for every job? But hey, if you could make it work, I’m all in lol.
Jeez, I’m a school bus driver and we get $30 an hour - obviously no degree is required.
CDL at least?
Yes, also passenger, school bus and air brake endorsements. And you have to pass random drug tests, which is the biggest hardship.
The best employees in my office went to State and Community college. The worst are the Ivy League ones who can’t pass a single test outside of college. The second worst are those given jobs way outside their skills or degree. Then not required to take training. I would take a no degree cert over a degree in wrong field any day.
Yeah…
Anyone who thinks this is a “good” thing are, at best, naive.
Long story short: For the vast majority of jobs, all that matters is having a college degree. Often not even in a vaguely related topic. Mostly because that provides a filter on job applications so that the hiring committee/person has time to go through the remaining applications.
Except, as anyone who has gone job hunting in the past year or two can tell you, the days of having fancy CVs/resumes and business cars are gone in favor of filling out a workday application for every single position and so forth. And that is because you are being put through filters based on specific listed skills, number of publications, etc. And those are increasingly “accelerated” through AI tools. And… AI is great at being biased as fuck.
So all this means is even more “studying for the application” as it were. Except instead of memorizing whatever algorithm or question a given company will ask, you need to do specific online courses from specific outlets and add specific keywords to your job history and so forth.
Only way to get a job nowadays is by personally knowing the management or boss, good ol’ nepotism…
To me, that’s basically what networking is in a nutshell
I’ve said it for years and years, it’s not what you know but who you know. That isn’t 100% true but it’s true more than it’s false.
It’s dumb, but really to get good jobs that tends to be the normal. I’m a great example of that. 7 months ago a previous boss reached out and offered me a new position making 50% more than I was. 100% remote, no on-call, no end-users, no hardware, etc. I jumped at it.
Would I have gotten it or even know there was an opening otherwise? Highly unlikely.
That’s at least my experience in IT, I doubt it’s unique.
I applied for an internal position 3 times as it came up frequently at a company I worked for for more money, and it wasn’t until I found out someone I met happened to know the person that position reports to talked me up that I actually got it. I never forgot got that and it definitely reflected in me leaving eventually.
As a recipient of something similar…I agree, but I wish it wasn’t that way. I got my current gig 2 years ago and just got a promo to senior with a sizeable pay raise and bonus. I work remote and out of state from a zero income tax state while keeping my HCOL pay scale.
I think I could go higher, but I’m against the same thing that is helping me out in my current position.
I also wish it wasn’t that way, but if you’ve ever tried to hire for a job requiring specific skills you’ll understand why it is that way.
A vast majority of candidates are completely unqualified and/or poor workers. By poor worker, I don’t mean someone that does their job 9-5 and goes home. I mean the dudes that sit on Reddit all day or simply don’t work most of the day and then blame their spouse/kid/dog/cousin/etc as to why they are unproductive. I’m sorry, but if it takes you 2 days to change the text on a label in a web project, then you are slacking. I say this as someone intimately familiar with the web project and understand exactly the work needed.
Networking solves a lot of that. I reach out to excoworkers all the time because they have proven they are both knowledgeable and not a slacker.
We are social animals after all. Networking will never go away for that reason. My best hires/promotions were people I already knew the strengths and opportunities of. The odds of getting a quality candidate are much higher if you already have a relationship with them.
That’s not nepotism, it’s networking. Nepotism is getting the job by being the boss’ kid. It’s also the reason why degrees/diplomas with a co-op or internship component are valuable. As a co-op, you’re a low-risk/low-cost hire and the manager can evaluate your skills and get to know you. Come graduation, if you did a good job, you can reach out to those managers and have a much better chance at getting hired.
I’m a programmer and I don’t think I’ve ever been asked about my education… not that I have much I’m mostly self taught. Even so, I can’t imagine what more education could give me to show in an interview.
The opensource community changes SOP for all of us basically every quarter so how is my education supposed to keep up with that?
The trick is that you have experience. Without years of experience, it’s extremely difficult to get hired without a degree.
What is the best way to teach yourself programming? I love tinkering with technology systems in my home, and have often thought about how writing simple programs could unleash some extra potential, but I don’t know where to start.
We programmers share our knowledge freely in user manuals, tutorials, articles and YouTube videos.
But in my experience the only thing that I see slowing down new programmers is motivation. You can’t really learn code without having a reason to apply what you’ve learned. You have to come up with a reason first, That’s my best advice.
I have ideas of things to do, but since I am starting from 0, I don’t even know what language to aim for, or what is a reasonable project to start with. I feel like I could definitely figure things out on my own from tutorials if I just had some basic primer about what’s out there and what things are typically designed to do.
I don’t know what I don’t know, so it is hard to know what questions I need to ask.
I have ideas of things to do, but since I am starting from 0
Perfect! You’ve taken the hardest step. I can give you advice from here.
Computers only really do 3 types of work, there can be more but most can be summarized like this:
- Displaying things on screen: this only ever happens on the end user’s device. React and React native are the best options for that.
- Copying data from one spot to the next: simple operations to get data from one location, reencode it and send it somewhere else, wether to the end user’s device or another database its all the same work. Typescript is best suited for that.
- Hard work: processing large blobs of data like reencoding pictures and videos, consuming megabytes of data at a time and running a calculation. Go is best suited for that.
Thank you so much for your responses! I feel a lot more encouraged after this conversation. You never know how the seeds you plant may grow—and you’ve definitely planted one today.
I think I’ll start with some basic move and rename stuff since that would save me some manual work, and then I’ll see how I can grow from there.
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Finally. Got grilled so much about this in my current job during the interview, so stupid.
- Senior full stack developer with many recommendations from past coworkers and 7 years experience, BUT with a B.S. in Biology
