Holding a degree not a certificate for job competence

Sometime back, accounting firms like Ernst and Young, PwC, surprised everyone by announcing that they would remove the degree classification from its entry criterial. The company, according to reports, “Found no evidence of a positive correlation” between academic success and achievement inside their company. Corporates like Lowes, Starbucks, Home Depot, even Apple, have slowly started saying that some of the entry level jobs may not require a degree or even an associate degree. In fact, many of these companies stated they would use their own assessments, to judge the qualifications of candidates. 

While academic qualifications would still be an important consideration for assessing candidates for jobs as a whole, but that would not be only way of assessing people. Academic qualifications or degrees would no longer be a barrier “to get a food in the door” to quote one HR and Talent Director. 

So the question arises: Why are some companies changing their hiring practices? 

The fact is a degree is no longer a predictor of on-the-job competencies. For long several leaders in the knowledge industry have been saying that despite getting good talent, they need to spend a lot of time, energy and resources in “training people on the job.” 

What does this mean for our traditional universities and colleges? 

Not all companies are moving out of the traditional mind-set of looking for academic marks and predictable degrees. But still, institutions are today forced to reimagine their higher education practices. To quote an article in Chief Learning Officer magazine, “Higher education is transitioning away from defining degrees as the amount of hours students spend in a classroom.” Instead, colleges are adopting approaches that focus on students demonstrating what they know and how they can apply their learning in various contexts. How, where and how long it takes students to learn does not matter, in a competency-based educational approach. 

Many learning specialists and corporate leaders reiterate that spending a specific number of credit hours in class in a college or university is not a definitive predictor of learning. A competence-based framework for higher education outcomes can go beyond the credit-hour framework. It encompasses metrics to show efficiency, effectiveness and fairness in learning outcomes. It focusses on how best students can demonstrate their learning and competence, and the effort a student has put in to achieve those competencies. 

It is a better way than assuming that just because a student has attended specific set of classes, courses and hours, and possesses a degree, he or she has the right credentials to enter a job or career. 

In one sentence, learning and demonstration of competence and applying knowledge to real world, is what counts, not the number of credits achieved by attending class.