Traditionally, employers have often made a bachelor’s degree, or in some cases, an advanced degree, a prerequisite for an interview. If you didn’t have your parchment paper, you couldn’t get in the door. But times have changed, and the advent of rapidly evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics, robotics, and quantum computing have created a new environment where what you learn in college becomes obsolete in just a few years. However, soft skills of creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and leadership are timeless and remain in demand by employers. As technology transforms the economy and society, the landscape and required skills for most disciplines are changing.
So the answer we’re hearing from industry is that they want workers to have timeless soft skills and a basic understanding of current knowledge and technology that will be useful as they learn new technologies. This knowledge and skills may not require a degree.
Futurist Mike Colagrossi believes that in the future we will need skills instead of degrees: "More and more well-known companies no longer require a college degree. Recently, Glassdoor created a list of companies that no longer require a degree. These include giants such as Apple and Google. Why have employment laws suddenly changed at these big companies?"
In his article for Business Magazine, Justin Bariso quotes LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner's description of the qualities employers are looking for: "These qualities are not necessarily obtained from a degree. When people screen through resumes or LinkedIn profiles, some qualities are completely overlooked. However, more and more people find that these are the people who make the biggest difference in our organizations. I hear this mantra more and more: value skills, not degrees. This is not to deny the skills of people with degrees, but to expand our vision to look beyond degrees."
The U.S. Department of Labor predicts that the U.S. economy will face a shortage of more than 2 million skilled workers by the end of this year. Companies are already feeling the pressure. For these gaps, they are no longer looking for white-collar or blue-collar workers, but rather “new-collar” workers: “Individuals who have developed the technical and soft skills necessary for tech jobs through nontraditional educational pathways. These workers do not have a four-year college degree. Instead, new-collar workers are trained through community colleges, vocational schools, software boot camps, technical certification programs, high school technical education, and on-the-job apprenticeships and internships.”
Amid this shift in candidate expectations, higher education is taking another hit, this time from Google. The tech giant launched an IT Support Specialist certificate through Coursera in 2018 that is currently recruiting tens of thousands of would-be applicants to fill a need in the IT support field. According to Natalie Van Kleef Conley, senior product manager at Grow With Google, “nearly 75,000 people have signed up. Conley said the program is picking up steam. Nationwide, more than 150,000 IT support job openings remain unfilled, according to Burning Glass Technologies. Federal data shows the average annual salary for these jobs is $52,000.” With Google leading the way, there’s no doubt other corporate leaders will follow suit, creating specialized certificates for their fields.
U.S. college enrollment is now declining for the eighth consecutive year, as job requirements are shifting. Hundreds of colleges have closed their doors in the past few years, and hundreds more are on the verge of collapse.
However, there is growing evidence that acquiring the skills described will be a necessity. Moreover, more and more degrees will become optional. Our higher education business is about developing these essential soft skills by training in the core skills of creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and leadership. At the same time, we must stay ahead of the implementation of teaching technologies; emerging practices and technologies; and develop students’ agility to apply knowledge in new contexts. If we succeed in these areas, higher education may yet retain degrees that are recognized by employers and future students. Are you ready for these changes? Will you lead your college learning to meet the new context of our role in the broader learning environment?
