Your next employer is more interested in your skills than your degree

During the last three years since the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way we work, the job market has taken many new shapes and forms. And now as companies push on return-to-office initiatives, generative AI shakes up the recruiting market, and more young people enter the workforce, employers are looking for different qualities in employees than in the past.

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according to bloomberg, LinkedIn is anticipating that employers and employees will abandon the formal qualifications that were once a staple in job search and hiring processes. Rather than degrees and prior experience, employers will focus their attention on an applicant’s skill set.

Employees are also taking longer to complete online courses and earn specialized certifications to make themselves more desirable to employers. Bloomberg points to LinkedIn’s skills-matching feature that allows users to list their skills and enables employers to find candidates based on their abilities.

According to LinkedIn, nearly half (45%) of recruiters on the site search for candidates based on specific skills. In the tech industry, a worker may be self-taught or complete a list of online courses and certifications to land themselves a job.

And the fast-changing nature of the tech industry means that companies are always on the lookout for highly skilled and specialized workers to fill hard-to-fill positions. Last year, companies such as Apple, IBM, Google and Meta announced that they would hire candidates without college degrees.

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These companies sought engineers, data analysts and hackers; Not all posts were entry level. Bloomberg reports that it is much easier to hire individuals for these positions without degrees because the roles often have concrete, standardized tests to prove personal competence.

But more abstract skills like storytelling and team leadership are harder to quantify. Joseph Fuller, a management professor at Harvard Business School, told Bloomberg that companies rely on candidates with a degree because it is harder to prove their understanding of intangible skills.

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By holding a degree, employers can assume that potential employees learned valuable skills in school, such as critical thinking, information seeking and communication.

but the more young americans drop out of collegeEmployers are being forced to consider a new way of hiring employees.

Will this new form of hiring move four-year degrees from the qualifications section of job listings to the preferred specialties section? Or will a degree continue to be the key achievement that people can rely on to find and keep a job?