Posted on 11/26/2022 7:38:37 AM PST by karpov
The tight labor market is prompting more employers to eliminate one of the biggest requirements for many higher-paying jobs: the need for a college degree.
Companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Delta Air Lines Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. have reduced educational requirements for certain positions and shifted hiring to focus more on skills and experience. Maryland this year cut college-degree requirements for many state jobs—leading to a surge in hiring—and incoming Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro campaigned on a similar initiative.
U.S. job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree were 41% in November, down from 46% at the start of 2019 ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that studies the future of work. Degree requirements dropped even more early in the pandemic. They have grown since then but remain below prepandemic levels.
The shift comes as demand for workers remains high and unemployment is low. Job postings far outpace the number of unemployed people looking for work—10.7 million openings in September compared with 5.8 million unemployed—creating unusually stiff competition for workers.
The persistently tight labor market has accelerated the trend that builds on a debate about the benefits and drawbacks of encouraging more people to attend four-year colleges and as organizations try to address racial disparities in the workplace.
Some occupations have universal degree requirements, such as doctors and engineers, while others typically have no higher education requirements, such as retail workers. There is a middle ground, such as tech positions, that have varying degree requirements depending on the industry, company and strength of the labor market and economy.
Lucy Mathis won a scholarship to attend a women in computer science conference.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Exactly. Send your child to an Ivy League school, or any school for that matter, and four years later they’re a hundred thousand dollars in debt and no smarter nor prepared for the world than when they left home.
I dint think that will change until the teachers are mandated teaching math in grade school
Back in my HR days (pre-feminization), the typical response to a suggestion to train employees is that if the company did, then the employees would jump ship to the competition for $1.00 an hour more.
My question in response to that, which was never answered by anything other than executive silence, was “then why are we not paying to retain qualified employees?”.
But then again, engineers are total failures at arranging all those posters with motivational slogans in the employee break room....... /S
It was really stupid to have to take certain courses for my degree in Engineering. Just a waste of time and money. Let ME choose the extra courses necessary to obtain a degree.
I hear that the BS in Vegan Marxism is all the rage right now.
It's worked for thousands of years.
And you dont need a damned union for it.
Well one area I don’t see the elite changing their minds is news reporting. In the
Past a good news reporter started from the bottom apprenticing in the business and become a great reporter even if they only had an 8th grade education and bias need not apply just the ability to describe a scene. Now it is required to have 4-6 years of training and indoctrination to write a certain way, now use woke language ( not every college but most), and train each “journalist” to write as if they were on the editorial page. New it is pro forma for the journalist to express their point of view on how they want you to think about any event rather than “allowing” the reader to make their own conclusions. Too many narcissists with don quijote syndrome write articles for whatever cause they or idea they want to think. I have wade through ideological defecation some sod wants me to agree with before I can read the facts to conduct real critical thinking.
“Might be better to train new employees instead of hoping they show up with all the skills they need.”
When I was a young punk ass know it all engineer, when I started at my company, I was put to work for a few weeks at a time as a line operator in every main area of the plant. Then I was put to work with our machinists and the electricians and maintenance. The machinists and electricians- were critical to the operation especially since this was a manufacturing facility deep in the desert, literally 100 miles from the nearest town so you couldn’t simply call contractors and most everything was fabricated and built in house. I did these jobs for 6 months before I started to do any engineering, and it quickly wiped the smug know it all attitude right off my face as I learned how much staggering amount of information that I did not know.
99% of degrees are totally worthless.
Certifications and an excellent work ethic is what ne needs.
Coming from a guy with 2 masters in IT and multiple prof. certifications.
The trouble is this going to take many many years for the people that are hiring (with degrees) to overcome the stigma of not having a degree.
They figure, I had to do all the work in college so you should as well.
I think many jobs would be better served if a degree wasn’t their first target. I think they would mostly be surprised with the improvements.
I knew a senior test technician like that. A former mid-level Navy NCO that had been to most of not all of the Navy’s electrical schools. Could run circles around book-smart but business-ignorant college graduates.
He was replaced with several lower cheap and inexperienced college grad engineers. After receiving repeated calls for assistance, he started giving them patently wrong advice, which they apparently followed through with.
When he was called back to the company as a consultant at roughly 6X his rate at termination, the cheap engineers were no longer with the company.
That said, whenever I have an open req in my shop, I always say "degree in ____ OR EQUIVALENT." Because, sometimes, for some jobs, I'll take a HS graduate with relevant experience and fire in his/her belly vs a well-credentialed slacker.
As for HR....I've had this discussion. They may push wokey nonsense AND when I was younger they seemed like deadweight loss. But as I aged, they've been invaluable partners in hiring people asap, helping me negotiate the minefield of regs, and showing "cancers in the office" the door without triggering a lawsuit.
Some corporate HR folks have drunk from the woke kook aid. But there are literally tens of thousands of larger firms and millions of middle market firms that don't worship at that alter. And I can't speak for your experience, but in my experience the average black/brown/plaid HR officer is interested in the firm (and them...) making money and not dying on the hill of wokeness. To be sure, they want me to review a diverse group of candidates, and to be fair most of the time many of us just want to nab the first guy that trips the Affinity Bias wire.
I've had good and terrible white guy hires, and good and bad "people of color" employees. I've worked with terrible men and awful women and visa versa. I've heard of guys who groped women colleagues, and women who are mean girl bosses. It can be a snake pit: Collectivism never works - individualism wins the day.
Ultimately, it all works out IF you have the right employer.
A monkey can be trained to watch a dial in a Nuke power plant and hit an emergency button if needed.
When I interview and hire, I completely ignore anything related to education on a resume.
Are you hiring for technical positions?
How do you evaluate recent college graduates?
“Apprenticeship.
It’s worked for thousands of years.
And you dont need a damned union for it.”
Before the unions, there were guilds...
Good grief!
They seem to thing every white person has at least a four-year degree.
Maybe in Silicon Valley and the Leftist Northeast, but just no everywhere else.
So many white people with only high school diplomas goes against their narrative... Or stupidity, if they can't think out of the box of their neo-liberal enclaves. Amirite? Nobody they knew voted for Nixon--how could he win???!!!
And don't get them started on Rednecks... Those people are all MAGA racist supremacists bitterly clinging to their guns and Bibles.
When I was in the garbage business we never hired licensed experienced truck drivers to drive garbage trucks. We always trained new drivers from scratch with zero truck driving experience. Why? Habits, life long habits from driving regular trucks that would cause serious liability issues operating garbage trucks. The most serious issue was they never look UP. They would get half tired and forget to look up before lifting containers. And they were extremely over confident all the time.
I think in some industries this would be a better practice. I have met a whole lot of “educated idiots” in my lifetime who had absolutely no common sense or analytic skills.
“When I interview and hire, I completely ignore anything related to education on a resume.”
Good for you... :)
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