Lockdown-era graduates have had it bad enough, forced to study alone on Zoom during the pandemic rather than share the valuable coming-of-age university experience enjoyed by their parents. Now they’re about to find out the university diploma they paid a pretty penny for is no longer even in demand.
According to new research from LinkedIn, skills now trump degrees in the eyes of recruiters. In fact, the share of job ads in the U.K. that didn’t list the qualification as a requirement surged by 90% on the platform between 2021 and 2022. Meanwhile, recruiters globally are now five times more likely to search for new hires by skills over higher education.
The shift comes as companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple have eliminated their long-held degree requirements for jobs to remove barriers to entry and recruit more diverse talent.
And it’s a trend that’s not waning any time soon, with 75% of recruiting professionals predicting skills-first hiring will be a priority for their company in the next 18 months, according to LinkedIn.
It comes as graduates are being told they lack skills
The shift to skills-based hiring is a fresh sting to COVID-era grads, who have also recently been told they lack some of the “basic” social skills needed to navigate the working world.
Two of the world’s Big Four accounting firms found that junior employees often exhibit weaker teamwork and communication skills, having spent part of their education isolated from their peers.
Deloitte and PwC, who run some of the largest graduate recruitment programs in Britain, are now offering extra training to young new hires that have “less confidence doing basic tasks” such as making presentations and speaking up in meetings.
Even colleges are stepping up to close the social skills gap between their students and the wider workforce. Michigan State University is getting its graduates ready for the job market with lessons on how to handle a networking conversation—including how to look for signs that the other party is starting to get bored and that it’s time to move on, as per the Wall Street Journal.
The school is also asking companies to give explicit guidance on a hire’s first day, including what to wear and where to get lunch. Miami University even organized a dinner with senior leaders in order to teach proper mealtime etiquette, such as how to engage in conversation on neutral topics.
Young people in Japan have become so used to socializing while wearing a face mask that they are now paying $55 an hour just to learn how to smile again—and some schools have even added the smiling class to their curriculum to prepare students for the job market.
Degrees still hold some value
As employers place more importance on young workers’ skills than their qualifications, have young highly qualified (but perhaps socially inept) Gen Z graduates wasted their time and money on the once sought overqualification? Yes and no.
First, it depends on the industry in which you want to work. As Zahra Amiry, Omnicom Media Group’s associate director of talent attraction, says, “You wouldn’t want to go to a doctor without a medical degree.” But for other industries, such as media and marketing, she says it’s becoming less of a requirement.
Even when scouring experienced professionals to fill senior roles, Amiry says she doesn’t necessarily look all the way back to somebody’s degree.
“What I do look at is their experience, their skills, how have they managed the team, how their CV is worded, how they come across in an interview, their attitude to work, and their energy,” she tells Fortune. “I would consider all of this before looking for a degree.”
Still, she doesn’t regret getting a degree herself. “I personally would never take back going to university. I think the experience itself was valuable and a good learning curve. It almost gives you the university of life,” says Amiry. “But bear in mind, it’s not necessary and very expensive.”
Despite a degree being a very costly route into the workforce—setting students back by more than $35,000 a year in the U.S. and around £9,250 a year in the U.K.—Lewis Maleh agrees that a diploma still holds value.
“A degree is very useful,” the CEO of the global executive recruitment agency Bentley Lewis tells Fortune. “On average people with degrees earn more money than people without degrees, and the vast majority of people in leadership roles are degree-educated.”
What’s more, he suspects that these nondegree job ads may be nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
“I don’t think we’re seeing job ads not requiring degrees increase because companies don’t want people with degrees,” Maleh says. “It’s marketing. A job ad is to attract people to apply, then hiring managers screen candidates based on whatever criteria they’ve decided.”
Ultimately, what goes on behind closed doors during the recruitment process could be a world away from what a company has published online.
“Also a lot of companies want to be perceived as open to people from different backgrounds in public,” Maleh cautions, “but when it comes down to selection, it’s a different story.”
