Now, Great Place to Work’s CEO is confirming the shift in priorities: Degrees really are irrelevant and are no longer as important to employers.
“Almost everyone is realizing that they’re missing out on great talent by having a degree requirement,” Bush tells Fortune. “That snowball is just growing.”
“The overwhelming focus of the last five years—and among companies on our list—is around skills and skills development,” he adds. “They’re not even talking about degrees now. They’re talking about skills. What skills do you have and what skills are going to be needed in the future? Lot of activity there.”
The CEO adds that the shift to skill-based hiring has caught on globally because ultimately, degrees only highlight a person’s knowledge in a subject matter—not whether they have the skills to actually do the task at hand.
“When you want to start doing matching between complex problems and the people needed to solve them, a degree doesn’t help,” Bush explains.
“What helps is whether or not people have perseverance and passion and the actual skills required to bring innovative solutions to the work and AI is being used now to match people to challenges and complex problems and companies. They’re going to do that using the skills database, not degrees. Degrees are irrelevant in that analysis.”
Bush says the shift towards skills-first hiring started for two key reasons: A talent shortage and an increase in leaders with hiring powers who themselves haven’t got a degree.
“That has helped people realize it’s not that important,” he adds. “It hasn’t been somebody woke up and realized, hey, maybe there’s a lot of talent that doesn’t have degrees.”
Most employers today have “some kind of psychometrics in their process, some way of seeing how self-aware the person is,” Bush echoes.
And in his eyes, the shift away from degrees being the only ticket to golden opportunities is mostly a good thing.
“We try and understand what people are doing to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to get hired at their company, to make sure everybody has an opportunity to get promoted within their company, these are requirements of being a great place to work for all—that there’s opportunities for all. All includes people who don’t have degrees,” Bush says.
“I’m not saying that they’re not worth having. Those are personal decisions that people make,” he adds. “It’s gaining acceptance in workplaces to focus more on true performance, and less on things that might be keeping you away from great talent—and degrees have a way of doing that.”
It’s not just employers who are saying degrees have been rendered obsolete; Young people who have them are taking stock of the current market and calling them worthless.
