Is IBM The New Harvard?
Top Companies Are Ditching College Degree Requirements in Favor of their Own
There’s a growing skill gap in the workforce in spite of the fact that more people than ever are getting college degrees. There is a disparity in many top job sectors between the skills students are graduating with and what companies are actually looking for in new hires.
As the world explodes with new technology, with new applications of those new technologies, and with changing demand on organizations, job requirements and ‘must-have” skills are evolving at breakneck speed. Most university curricula and career services, however, are lagging way behind. Students are completing courses and degrees, but universities aren’t graduating students with the important skills that employers need now.
As a startling result, many tech-forward companies have eliminated college degrees as a job requirement in favor of candidates who have the specific skills they need.
Every Company is a Tech Company
In my role as a career coach, I have seen solid evidence to support the assertion by Plinio Ayala, the CEO of Per Scholas, that “every company is a tech company now”. I have many young clients who are looking for roles in fields like finance, consulting, and advertising who find they need to supplement their prestigious degrees from schools like Wharton, Brown, and Duke with digital certifications, coding bootcamps, and other online coursework to fill the skill gap for jobs as data analysts, project managers, and digital marketers.
No DEgree Needed
As the disparity between the skills students graduate with and the skills companies are looking for grows, a surprising number of major corporations are no longer requiring college degrees. Tesla, Alphabet, Meta, Ernst & Young, Netflix, Bank of America, and Accenture are all part of a growing list of savvy top companies that have bypassed college education as a must-have in search of talent with the cutting-edge skills they critically need right now. Quite a shock, perhaps, to students who have just spent 200k for a degree that was supposed to ensure placement and advancement.
While the issue is common in technology companies, it’s not limited to those jobs alone. A 2020 survey by McKinsey points to skill shortages across the workforce, including executive management, R&D, sales, marketing and human resources.
There are over 300,000 job listings on LinkedIn today that do not require a college degree. Over 100,000 are at the mid-senior, executive, and director level. One study cites that 34% of U.S. companies have eliminated degree requirements for their listings this year, with 76% of hiring managers stating they’re likely to favor experience over education. According to that same study, 77% of those companies are currently offering in-house apprenticeships, or plan to, to make sure workers have develop the skills they’ll need as jobs evolve.
The Growth of New Skills-Based Education Programs
The problem has become so critical that that many organizations are now hiring people to teach workers what they don’t know, but need to know in order to do their jobs successfully.
Businesses are spending more than ever (an estimated $800,000 a year) to find qualified employees for jobs whose starting salaries typically range from $60,000 - $120,000 a year. With the stakes that high, it clearly makes sense for them to invest in educating and growing the workforce they need if universities and colleges aren’t equipping students with the skills they need. The result is the growth of a rich ecosystem or skills-based education programs, outside the realm of conventional higher education.
Companies like IBM, Amazon, Google, Salesforce, and Meta, among many others, now have their own education and training programs that offer in-house learning, partnerships with educators, and/or partnerships with online platforms like Coursera and General Assembly, to both train new hires and upskill existing employees.
Will IBM Become the Next Harvard?
The skills gap is clearly not just a problem for companies. This lack of specific skill-based qualifications is one of the primary reasons cited by recent graduates who are struggling to find work.
One recent study shared that 90% of more than 300 job applications submitted by recent graduates received no response at all from employers. The reason? The algorithms used by hiring departments automatically screen out resumes that lack the must-have skills (as a result, a critical part of my work with young clients is identifying these must-haves, first and foremost, and addressing the gaps.)
If we’re seeing that Associate, Bachelor’s, and Master’s degrees are no longer guarantees that job candidates will automatically rise to the top, we need to ask – and answer - these important questions:
1. What are the best ways for students and professionals to navigate this changing landscape?
2. Will IBM become the new Harvard?
Maintain a Growth Mindset
As the skills gap widens, the best strategy is to adopt – or nurture – a lifelong learner mindset, coupled with pragmatic ownership of your own education and skills acquisition.
Given that college programs have been slowly – or reluctant - to adapt to this significant shift – it’s more and more up to the individual job seeker to determine what they need to know and where to learn it. For current students, that means taking an early, deep dive into the real time skills they anticipate needing for their target sector, well before they graduate. For college grads and workers who are already on a career path, taking courses online or their free time to stay ahead of the skills curve could make all the difference in where they go next and how successfully.
Here are the three key steps I recommend to anyone seeking to acquire more marketable skills to ensure their talents and skills are a match for the jobs they want:
Start early! What employers are looking for is readily available in the job descriptions companies go to great lengths to craft. Understanding the must-haves, both hard and soft skills, is the first step. Get started here and here. You can - and should - do your own research to see what’s skills are valuable - and which ones you’re missing through sector-specific media, what informational interviews (hyperlink to Spearmint), and old-fashioned networking. Then find free or affordable courses and other resources online, at bootcamps, or even in other departments at your own school. As one client recently told me, the smartest class he took at his Ivy league school was a class in Excel where he learned to work with large data sets! He’s a business major and this wasn’t even a requirement. (Maybe it should be!)
Experiential learning: Carefully selected internships, coops, and campus jobs can give you some of the real-world skills you’ll need. Volunteer work in your community if you’re out of school is another great way to learn, acquire, or polish software skills for instance, while doing good AND building your resume with those skills.
Think learning agile; The skills and software of today are not the skills and software of tomorrow. Panasonic, for example, is focusing on this new reality with 400 new hires in their new partnership with Tesla. As Allan Swan, President of Panasonic Energy of North America, stated: “we can’t hire experienced professionals as this is new technology.” Instead, they’re looking for hires who can demonstrate enthusiasm and a readiness to learn.
The privilege and purpose of a college education is not irrelevant: the opportunity to pursue genuine interests and grow intellectually is immeasurable and should enhance your abilities to write, think critically and relate to others. But building your job skills and experience requires a similar focus.
Increasingly, the most successful candidates will be those who have shown the initiative, organization, and goal setting needed to manage their own education strategy – whether it’s at Harvard, Coursera, or IBM U.- that will prepare them with the important skills employers are looking for right now and in the rapidly approaching future.