what is more important skills or education

Human Resources

Degrees vs skills: 5 reasons why skills matter more than degrees today.

The importance of degrees

I come from a family that values formal education. The fact that I would graduate high school and go onto University for a bachelor’s degree was a given. Even further, my parents expected that all four of their children would get their Master’s degrees. And we did. 

Most of us didn’t question the path we were set on. We accepted the premise that advanced degrees would further our career trajectories. We embraced the undergraduate and then graduate experiences. We made friends. We made homes on campus, in the libraries and pubs. And we didn’t consider the opportunity cost of those years, jammed in a classroom, rather than in pursuit of other skills development.

The discussion of degree vs skills development didn’t exist. Or at least in my world it didn’t. We were bought into the benefits that we believed of our University degrees would yield:

• Increased chance of employment
• Higher average earnings
• Expanded opportunities
• Prepared for the future
• Develop new relationships

It’s not that my parents were wrong, per se. But this sole focus on degrees, without a view of skills development, is a dated idea.

Today, we know that in the debate of degree vs skills, skills are very important.

Hard and soft skills

Skills are the specific learned abilities that you need to perform a given job or complete tasks. If you’ve ever tried to develop a new skill, you’ll know that they are often built across years of experience, repetition, trial and error. A skill can be anything that one does really well including writing, cooking, playing a musical instrument or coding in Python. Skills can be gained and applied at work or in any area of life.

‍ While there are lots of different types of skills, skills have traditionally been divided into two categories:

• hard skills
• soft skills

What are hard skills?

Hard skills are the skills required to do the individual tasks that are unique to a specific job. 

Hard skills include things like:

• Financial modelling
• Statistical modelling
• Copywriting

Some hard skills can be very specific and specialized to a narrow set of jobs while others can be broadly applicable to many types of jobs across different industries. 

The requirements associated with a hard skill are constantly changing and evolving with innovations in technology. So people often require continuous retraining to keep pace with the latest tools and techniques in their field.

‍ What are soft skills?

Soft skills are non-technical skills and characteristics that shape the way you work and behave on your own and with others. 

Soft skills include things like:

• Collaboration
• Emotional intelligence
• Adaptability
• Communication

The mix and balance of hard and soft skills that an employee ought to possess truly varies by industry, role and organization. 

But some of the most important soft skills are resilience and adaptability, given how quickly the world is changing, and how much shorter the half life of hard skills are becoming.

5 reasons why skills matter more than degrees today

Today, employers are removing the requirement for degrees from their hiring credentials. In a recent report from the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation , employers are getting ready for a world where skills - not degrees - are the most important requirement when filling a job.

So what's driving this change?

1. Digitization and automation

Digitizing and automating activities are allowing business to:

• Improve performance
• Reduce errors
• Increase output, quality, speed
• And deliver outcomes that people cannot do alone

Automation has contributed to higher levels of productivity since the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, is generating better economic outcomes and higher standards of living. 

But when it comes to skills, automation is increasing the pace at which skills become less valuable or not needed at all. Machine Learning, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) are some of the key technologies that are contributing to the automation of both repetitive, non-complex tasks and complex cognitive tasks that were previously done by humans. 

According to the OECD, more than 1 billion jobs (~ 1/3 of all jobs worldwide), are likely to be transformed by technology in the next decade. At the same time, ~40-50% of employees don’t think they’re equipped to do their current job because of how quickly technology is changing

2. Emergence of more niche markets

The economy is fundamentally changing. As Forbes points out, with the emergence of a wider range of interest groups, social groups, language groups businesses respond by targeting these groups with products and solutions tailored to them.

3. The Changing Nature of Work

Work, and the way we work, is changing. Gone are the days where a person joined an organization when they finished University and College and spent the next three decades climbing the corporate ladder until they finally settled into retirement. 

Today, companies are becoming more networked, team-based, and always finding ways to be quicker to respond to competitive threats or rapid world changes - like a pandemic. As the blistering external rate of change continues to permeate companies of all sizes, the needs of most jobs will continue to shift under the feet of those within them. Additionally, the widespread hybrid work model that’s spawned following the pandemic has been driving greater changes in the nature of jobs and the manner in which employees must re-learn how to interact with their colleagues. Remote work is also leaving gaps in coaching and mentorship as the organic learning that takes place between team members no longer exists.

LinkedIn looked at its user data and saw that the skills for jobs have changed around 25% since 2015 – and by 2027 that number is expected to double. This means that the requirements of one’s job is changing, even if the person in the specific job doesn’t change roles.

4. Diversity, equity and inclusion

We know that access and value of education is not equal in our society. Requiring education can be exclusionary of equity deserving groups and casts a discriminatory and biased shadow over organizations hiring practices. A skills-first lens is a more equitable lens for hiring.

5. Half life of skills is shrinking

A skill's half life is the rate at which the value of a skill declines by half.

All skills have different half lives, and the length is determined by how quickly that skill is being disrupted by changes. For example, the half life of digital marketing skills is very short because the digital advertising platforms are constantly changing their algorithms and core technology that alters the success of an advertising campaign. Folks in digital advertising constantly need to be staying on top of trends in order to ensure their skills are keeping pace with the technology.

The World Economic Forum tells us that the rate of professional skill obsolescence is intensifying. Once estimated at 10 to 15 years, the half-life of a skill today is five years and likely shorter for pure technical skills.  This means that a skill learned today is likely to be half as valuable in five years or less vs historically where skills lasted a decade or longer. 

Harnessing the power of skills

With skills increasingly becoming the currency of competition, you may find yourself at a loss for how you might go about reorienting recruitment and development efforts to focus on skills. Shifting an organization’s talent philosophy from credential-based to skills-based can be daunting. But it's worth it. There are several ways to start building out a skills-first approach but really there are 4 tenants:

• Skills Profiles
• Skills Inventories

Competencies

• Application-based learning

Let’s go through each one:

Skills profiles

Skills profiles are individual representations of the skills associated with a person or the skills that are required for specific types of roles. 

Instead of basing the requirements for roles on years of experience and credentials, skills profiles focus on:

• What an individual must be able to do vs 
• What they have done in the past 

In a time where there are more ways to acquire and develop skills, organizations that anchor their recruitment and talent management practices around skills profiles can multiply their talent pool at much lower cost than those who don’t. 

Additionally, widely distributed skills profiles give immediate transparency to everyone in an organization on the types of skills the company values and what skills profiles are most critical to their business strategy. 

And as a very critical last point, which shouldn’t be considered as last whatsoever, it helps eliminate, or at least reduce, bias from the candidate evaluation processes.

Skill inventories

A skills inventory is a comprehensive database that documents and identifies the breadth and depth of hard and soft skills that exist within an organization. This data is traditionally gathered through employees’ self-assessed proficiencies. It can also be gathered through formal skills assessments. Skills inventories are created around individual skills profiles and help organizations understand the skills of the organizations. It also helps organizations understand the dispersion and concentration of skills across pockets of the company. 

Importantly, or even maybe more exciting, Skills Inventories also help organizations baseline where their glaring skills gaps exist. Once you know a problem, only then can you go about solving it! 

A well defined, well maintained and fulsome skills inventory can also be a powerful enabler of internal mobility and career pathing as it immediately becomes easier to identify the transferable skills that exist across seemingly unrelated organizational functions and disciplines. Skills inventories also help talent and business leaders strategically identify current and future recruitment, workforce planning or learning and development needs. Skills inventories are key for aligning the strategy of an organization and the people investments that are required to drive that strategy.

While a skills-first approach is one of the most important components of future proofing talent management and recruitment strategies, skills must be complemented by an emphasis on competencies to ensure a holistic approach. 

Unlike skills, competencies are a person’s knowledge and behaviours that lead them to be successful in a job. They are by nature, broader and go beyond being able to complete certain discrete tasks. Although different, in scope, competencies encompass a cross section of multiple discrete skills. Problem solving, strategic planning, data-driven decision making, and influence are examples of competencies. While skills (especially hard skills) are emphasized at the start of your career, competencies become more important as you get more senior.

Application based learning

L&D programs continue to fail organizations and employees, despite the billions of dollars that continue to be funneled towards them annually. But it's not your fault! 

Despite organization’s opting to decentralize general L&D (vs executive L&D) through “choose your own learning adventure” programs via employer sponsored content or individual learning allowances, the data shows that it’s still not working.

75% of managers are dissatisfied with their company’s Learning & Development (L&D) function and only 12% of employees apply new skills learned in L&D programs to their jobs. Sadly, much of the investments organizations make when it comes to learning is either focused on the wrong things or don’t tie the goals of employees to the organization’s strategy. A skills-first L&D strategy leaves this approach behind in favor of fostering flexible work assignments, internal gigs/ projects and customized individual learning programs that blend learning content with real life assignments that are part of an employee’s job. 

By focusing on skills, employees can tangibly bridge the gaps across individual skill profiles while the organization deliberately fills gaps in their skills inventory. This is how skills-first organizations ensure they are making the right L&D investments to drive their strategy and provide their people with the growth opportunities they desire to stick around.   

tirl Workforce

There is no quick fix or easy way to shift towards a skills-first strategy but there are tools out there that can help you (hint: we are one of them). With skills rapidly becoming the currency of the changing world of work, a skills-first approach is the key to ensuring organizational resiliency, enabling exciting and dynamic careers for current and future employees and making sure you can compete in some of the most volatile business environments we’ve seen.

Elysha Ames

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Nonacademic Skills Are Key To Success. But What Should We Call Them?

Anya Kamenetz

More and more people in education agree on the importance of learning stuff other than academics.

But no one agrees on what to call that "stuff".

There are least seven major overlapping terms in play. New ones are being coined all the time. This bagginess bugs me, as a member of the education media. It bugs researchers and policymakers too.

"Basically we're trying to explain student success educationally or in the labor market with skills not directly measured by standardized tests," says Martin West, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. "The problem is, you go to meetings and everyone spends the first two hours complaining and arguing about semantics."

West studies what he calls "non-cognitive skills." Although he's not completely happy with that term.

The problem isn't just semantic, argues Laura Bornfreund, deputy director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation. She wrote a paper on what she called "Skills for Success," since she didn't like any of these other terms. "There's a lot of different terms floating around but also a lack of agreement on what really is most important to students."

As Noah Webster, the great American lexicographer and educator, put it back in 1788, "The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities ; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head. "

Yet he didn't come up with a good name, either.

So, in Webster's tradition, here's a short glossary of terms that are being used for that cultivation of the heart. Vote for your favorite in the comments — or propose a new one.

According to the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, a research and advocacy group, these include the "4Cs of critical thinking, collaboration, communication and creativity," as well as "life and career skills" and "information, media and technology skills."

The problem, says West, is that "if anything, all the evidence would suggest that in the closing decades of the 20th and 21st centuries, cognitive skills became more important than ever." So this term, although it's often heard in business and technology circles, doesn't necessarily signal the shift in focus that some researchers want.

Character education has a long history in the U.S., with a major vogue in the 1930s and a revival in the 1980s and 1990s. Beginning a few years ago, the KIPP charter schools in New York City started to emphasize a curriculum of seven "character strengths": grit, zest, optimism, self-control, gratitude, social intelligence and curiosity.

"We're not religious, we're not talking about ethics, we're not going to give any kind of doctrine about what is right from wrong," says Leyla Bravo-Willey of KIPP Infinity in Harlem. "But there are some fundamental things that make people really great citizens, which usually include being kind."

West argues that the use of "character" is inappropriate in research and policymaking because of its moral and religious connotations.

He notes that many of the qualities on the KIPP list — grit and self-control, for example — are designed to prepare students for success. "That's in tension with a traditional understanding of character, which often implies something being good in and of itself — which often includes some notion of self sacrifice," says West.

That distinction doesn't bother Bravo-Willey. She says that the school is responding to parents' own wishes that their children be happy and good as well as successful.

Grit is a pioneer virtue with a long American history — think of the classic western True Grit . When Angela Duckworth was working on her dissertation in the mid-2000s, she chose the term to encapsulate the measures of self-control, persistence and conscientiousness that she was finding to be powerful determinants of success. It quickly caught on — maybe too quickly, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist says.

"I'm grateful for the attention, but that gratitude and amazement was quickly replaced by anxiety about people thinking that we had figured things out already." She's worried that grit is being overemphasized: In a recent paper, she argued that grit measures aren't ready to be incorporated into high stakes accountability systems. "I'm also concerned that people interpret my position to be that grit's the only thing that matters."

Larry Nucci at UC Berkeley, who has studied moral development and character education for 40 years, has stronger words for grit. "I think it's flavor of the month. It's not very substantive, it's not very deep."

Carol Dweck, the Stanford University psychologist, chose the term mindset in 2007 for the title of her bestselling book.

" Growth mindset " is the belief that positive traits, including intelligence, can be developed with practice. "Fixed mindset" refers to the idea that intelligence and other talents are set at birth.

"In my research papers I had some very, very clunky scientific-sounding term for the fixed and the growth mindset," she says. "When I went to write the book I thought, these will not do at all."

Mindset has caught on tremendously in both the business and education worlds. But Dweck's concern is that it's being used willy-nilly to justify any old intuition that people might have about positive thinking in the classroom.

"When people start thinking, 'I'll make the kids feel good and they'll learn,' that's how something like the self-esteem movement gains traction," — a 1980s trend that led to lots of trophies but little improvement in achievement.

This term is most strongly associated with the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman. He analyzed large data sets to show that attributes such as self-discipline and persistence — not just academic achievement — affected education, labor market and life outcomes.

This term is "ugly, broad, nonspecific," argues Carol Dweck — and she's a fan. "I'm the only person who likes the term," she says. "And I'll tell you why: It is a very diverse group of factors and the reason it's been hard to come up with a name is that they don't necessarily belong together."

Martin West at Harvard uses this term himself, but he says he's always careful to acknowledge that it can be "misleading."

"Every skill or trait is cognitive in the sense that it involves and reflects the processing of information of some kind in our brains," he says. And West adds that traditional academic skills more often than not are complements, not substitutes, for the attitudes and personality traits captured by the term "non-cognitive skills."

Nobody I spoke with hates this term.

"Increasingly teachers who are on the front line say that it's very important to teach kids to be more socially and emotionally competent," says Roger P. Weissberg, chief knowledge officer of the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which promotes the concept and the term nationwide. "Teachers feel, and growing research supports, that it helps them academically, it improves school climate, it improves discipline, and it's going to help them to be college and career — and life — ready."

The only problem is that the "skills" part may not be seen as encompassing things that are more like attitudes or beliefs, like growth mindset. And the "social and emotional" part, again, may be seen as excluding skills that are really cognitive in nature.

This is tough, right?

Employers commonly use " soft skills " to include anything from being able to write a letter, to showing up on time and having a firm handshake. Most of the researchers I spoke with felt this phrase downplays the importance of these skills. "Soft skills, along with 21st century skills, strike me as exceptionally vague," says West. "I don't know that there's anything soft about them."

So the struggle persists. Maybe one day there will be a pithy acronym or portmanteau to wrap all these skills up with a bow. SES? SEL? N-COG? Gri-Grow-Sess? Let us know what you think.

What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

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What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

More From Forbes

Skills vs. degrees: redefining talent in the future of work.

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Not all skilled jobs need a college degree

The classic distinction in economic discussions is between “skilled” and “unskilled” labor. That in itself suggests it is skills that matter, not whether a worker has earned a four-year college degree. But education is supposed to impart skills, and so the two concepts inevitably overlap; “unskilled labor” has come to refer to both jobs that do not require specific specialized skills as well as to jobs that require at most a high school diploma.

Educational attainment is a proxy for useful skills, but when employers are searching for talent, what do they actually look for?

A study published this year by the Burning Glass Institute, highlighted also by the Wall Street Journal, argues that US employers have been shifting their focus from degrees to skills. This is measured by changes in the percentage of job openings that require at least a four year college degree.

The report argues that this shift is largely structural, even though it has been accentuated by the pandemic. In other words: the pandemic lockdowns increased demand for unskilled labor, such as warehouse and delivery workers; but about two-thirds of the change took place before the pandemic and is therefore likely to be long-lasting.

The evidence still raises a number of question marks, but it bears on two very important issues:

• The extent to which technological innovation is disrupting the nature of jobs; and
• The education system’s ability to keep up and provide the skills needed in a changing workplace.

Start with a few set-staging stats highlighted by the report:

About one-quarter of US jobs definitely require at least a four-year degree. You can’t (yet) be a physician or an engineer without the requisite formal education; every employer requires it. Close to four jobs in ten fall squarely in the no-degree-required category: for example delivery drivers and many retail workers. That leaves about one third of jobs in the grey area where a college degree might or might not be required.

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Next: there is, unsurprisingly, some correlation between the tightness of the labor market and employers’ insistence on degrees. When the labor market gets very tight, with low unemployment and limited response from labor participation, employers can’t bee too picky; so if they think a job can be done by someone without a college degree, they are more likely to drop the requirement. Conversely, when the labor market is weak and the supply of workers is abundant, employers are more likely to ask for college degrees — this is indeed what happened in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 Great Recession.

In this light, evidence of a structural “reset” from degrees to skills appears thin: the Burning Glass Institute highlights a significant shift away from degree requirements between 2017 and 2019; but during that period the labor market, which had been strengthening gradually since 2010, entered in very tight territory, with the unemployment rate dropping from about 5% to a record low 3 1/2 %. At least some of the move away from degree requirements might have reflected an exceptionally challenging hiring environment — as the report recognizes.

More telling might be the finding that employers have tended to replace degree requirements with a more granular specification of the skills they are looking for. This mirrors two ongoing trends:

• First, technological innovation is disrupting the nature of more and more jobs. Some level of digital skills is becoming necessary in a wider range of occupations; digital innovation in manufacturing is leading companies to restructure their operations in a way that needs to be accompanied by changing tasks and job descriptions.
• Second, the traditional education system has struggled to keep pace with these changes, and to produce the skills increasingly demanded in the workplace. This in turn has contributed to the student debt problem, where a large number of students either drop out or graduate with a heavy debt burden and without the skills that would allow them to repay it. It has also contributed to a widening skills gap, notably in manufacturing.

This has started to trigger important change and disruption in the world of education and learning: it has underscored the role of community colleges and the importance of a stronger dialogue and collaboration between schools and employers; and it is spurring the growth of a more flexible education ecosystem based on micro-credentials and life-long learning.

Bottom-line: it may be too early to tell if we are witnessing a structural move away from degree requirements in job postings; but employers’ more granular focus on the skills required in a changing workplace reflects momentous underlying innovations and is most likely to continue — education institutions had better take notice.

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21st Century Skills

The term 21 st century skills refers to a broad set of knowledge, skills, work habits, and character traits that are believed—by educators, school reformers, college professors, employers, and others—to be critically important to success in today’s world, particularly in collegiate programs and contemporary careers and workplaces. Generally speaking, 21 st century skills can be applied in all academic subject areas, and in all educational, career, and civic settings throughout a student’s life.

It should be noted that the “21 st century skills” concept encompasses a wide-ranging and amorphous body of knowledge and skills that is not easy to define and that has not been officially codified or categorized. While the term is widely used in education, it is not always defined consistently, which can lead to confusion and divergent interpretations. In addition, a number of related terms—including applied skills , cross-curricular skills , cross-disciplinary skills , interdisciplinary skills , transferable skills , transversal skills , noncognitive skills , and soft skills , among others—are also widely used in reference to the general forms of knowledge and skill commonly associated with 21 st  century skills. While these different terms may not be strictly synonymous, and they may have divergent or specialized meanings in certain technical contexts, these diverse sets of skills are being addressed in this one entry for the purposes of practicality and usefulness.

While the specific skills deemed to be “21 st century skills” may be defined, categorized, and determined differently from person to person, place to place, or school to school, the term does reflect a general—if somewhat loose and shifting—consensus. The following list provides a brief illustrative overview of the knowledge, skills, work habits, and character traits commonly associated with 21 st century skills:

• Critical thinking, problem solving, reasoning, analysis, interpretation, synthesizing information
• Research skills and practices, interrogative questioning
• Creativity, artistry, curiosity, imagination, innovation, personal expression
• Perseverance, self-direction, planning, self-discipline, adaptability, initiative
• Oral and written communication, public speaking and presenting, listening
• Leadership, teamwork, collaboration, cooperation, facility in using virtual workspaces
• Information and communication technology (ICT) literacy, media and internet literacy, data interpretation and analysis, computer programming
• Civic, ethical, and social-justice literacy
• Economic and financial literacy, entrepreneurialism
• Global awareness, multicultural literacy, humanitarianism
• Scientific literacy and reasoning, the scientific method
• Environmental and conservation literacy, ecosystems understanding
• Health and wellness literacy, including nutrition, diet, exercise, and public health and safety

While many individuals and organizations have proposed definitions of 21 st century skills, and most states have adopted learning standards that include or address cross-disciplinary skills, the following are three popular models that can serve to illustrate the concept and its applications in education:

• Framework for 21 st Century Learning  (The Partnership for 21 st Century Skills)
• Four Keys to College and Career Readiness  (David T. Conley and the Educational Policy Improvement Center)
• Seven Survival Skills  (Tony Wagner and the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education)

For related discussions, see content knowledge and learning standards .

Generally speaking, the 21 st century skills concept is motivated by the belief that teaching students the most relevant, useful, in-demand, and universally applicable skills should be prioritized in today’s schools, and by the related belief that many schools may not sufficiently prioritize such skills or effectively teach them to students. The basic idea is that students, who will come of age in the 21 st century, need to be taught different skills than those learned by students in the 20 th century, and that the skills they learn should reflect the specific demands that will placed upon them in a complex, competitive, knowledge-based, information-age, technology-driven economy and society.

While 21 st century skills are relevant to all areas of schooling and academic study, and the skills may be taught in a wide variety of in-school and outside-of-school settings, there are a few primary ways in which 21 st century skills intersect with efforts to improve schools:

• Teachers may be more intentional about teaching cross-disciplinary skills in subject-area courses. For example, in a science course students might be required to learn research methods that can also be applied in other disciplines; articulate technical scientific concepts in verbal, written, and graphic forms; present lab results to a panel of working scientists; or use sophisticated technologies, software programs, and multimedia applications as an extension of an assigned project.
• States, accrediting organizations, and schools may require 21 st century skills to be taught and assessed in courses. For example, states can adopt learning standards that explicitly describe cross-disciplinary skills, and assessments may be designed or modified to evaluate whether students have acquired and mastered certain skills.
• Schools and teachers may use educational approaches that inherently encourage or facilitate the acquisition of cross-disciplinary skills. For example, educational strategies such as authentic learning , demonstrations of learning , or  project-based learning tend to be cross-disciplinary in nature, and students—in the process of completing a research project, for example—may have to use a variety of applied skills, multiple technologies, and new ways of analyzing and processing information, while also taking initiative, thinking creatively, planning out the process, and working collaboratively in teams with other students.
• Schools may allow students to pursue alternative learning pathways in which students earn academic credit and satisfy graduation requirements by completing an internship, apprenticeship, or volunteer experience, for example. In this case, students might acquire a variety of practical, job-related skills and work habits, while also completing academic coursework and meeting the same learning standards required of students in more traditional academic courses.

While there is broad agreement that today’s students need different skills than were perhaps taught to previous generations, and that cross-disciplinary skills such as writing, critical thinking, self-initiative, group collaboration, and technological literacy are essential to success in higher education, modern workplaces, and adult life, there is still a great deal of debate about 21 st century skills—from what skills are most important to how such skills should be taught to their appropriate role in public education. Given that there is no clear consensus on what skills specifically constitute “21 st century skills,” the concept tends to be interpreted and applied in different ways from state to state or school to school, which can lead to ambiguity, confusion, and inconsistency.

Calls for placing a greater emphasis on cross-disciplinary skills in public education are, generally speaking, a response to the perception that most public schools pay insufficient attention to the postsecondary preparation and success of students. In other words, the concept has become a touchstone in a larger debate about what public schools should be teaching and what the purpose of public education should be. For example: Is the purpose of public education to get students to pass a test and earn a high school diploma? Or is the purpose to prepare students for success in higher education and modern careers? The push to prioritize 21 st century skills is typically motivated by the belief that all students should be equipped with the knowledge, skills, work habits, and character traits they will need to pursue continued education and challenging careers after graduation, and that a failure to adequately prepare students effectively denies them opportunities, with potentially significant consequences for our economy, democracy, and society.

A related debate centers on the distinction between “knowledge” and “skills,” and how schools and teachers may interpret—or misinterpret—the concepts. Some educators argue that it’s not possible to teach cross-disciplinary skills separately from knowledge and conceptual understanding—for example, students can’t learn to write well if they don’t have ideas, facts, principles, and philosophies to write about. The basic idea is that “21 st century skills” is an artificial concept that can’t be separated out from subject-area knowledge and instruction. Other educators may argue that cross-disciplinary skills have historically been ignored or under-prioritized in schools, and the push to give more emphasis and attention to these skills is simply a commonsense response to a changing world.

The following list provides a few additional examples of representative arguments that may be made in support of teaching 21 st century skills:

• In today’s world, information and knowledge are increasing at such an astronomical rate that no one can learn everything about every subject, what may appear true today could be proven to be false tomorrow, and the jobs that students will get after they graduate may not yet exist. For this reason, students need to be taught how to process, parse, and use information, and they need adaptable skills they can apply in all areas of life—just teaching them ideas and facts, without teaching them how to use them in real-life settings, is no longer enough.
• Schools need to adapt and develop new ways of teaching and learning that reflect a changing world. The purpose of school should be to prepare students for success after graduation, and therefore schools need to prioritize the knowledge and skills that will be in the greatest demand, such as those skills deemed to be most important by college professors and employers. Only teaching students to perform well in school or on a test is no longer sufficient.
• Given the widespread availability of information today, students no longer need teachers to lecture to them on the causes of the Civil War, for example, because that information is readily available—and often in more engaging formats that a typical classroom lecture. For this reason, educators should use in-school time to teach students how to find, interpret, and use information, rather than using most or all of the time to present information.

The following list provides a few examples of representative arguments that may be made against the concept of 21 st century skills:

• Public schools and teachers have always taught, and will continue to teach, cross-disciplinary skills—they just never gave it a label. The debate over “content vs. skills” is not new—educators have been talking about and wrestling with these issues for a century—which makes the term “21 st century skills” somewhat misleading and inaccurate.
• Focusing too much on cross-disciplinary skills could water-down academic courses, and students may not get “the basics.” The more time teachers spend on skill-related instruction, the less time they will have for content-based instruction. And if schools privilege cross-disciplinary skills over content knowledge , students may be denied opportunities because they are insufficiently knowledgeable. Students need a broad knowledge base, which they won’t receive if teachers focus too much on skill-related instruction or “learning how to learn.”
• Cross-disciplinary skills are extremely difficult to assess reliably and consistently. There are no formal tests for 21 st century skills, so the public won’t know how well schools are doing in teaching these skills.

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Posted by Des Sinkevich on October 26, 2022

Not only has work and the workplace fundamentally changed over the last few years, how Gen-Z gets into the workforce is shifting as well. More and more Gen-Z high schoolers are becoming skeptical of the traditional high school-college-dream job pathway that so many of us have trod before them. With the workforce of the future doubting the need for college degrees, employers will have to change hiring practices in order to attract new workers and ensure they are qualified for the job.

Though 72% of employers agree that degree possession alone isn’t a reliable method of assessing job readiness and applicants’ skills, 52% continue to hire based on degree attainment because they consider it “less risky.” Finishing a degree program signals a certain level of commitment but excludes workers who have demonstrated persistence in skill gain in other ways. Despite this, many job posts still list minimum degree requirements for entry-level positions, eliminating a slew of skilled and dedicated workers from qualifying. And, in a job market that currently favors workers over employers – there are a larger number of job openings than potential hires looking for new roles - focusing on outdated hiring practices that emphasize a degree over skills will be ultimately detrimental to company growth over time. With that in mind, employers need to rethink how to best determine who will make a good employee: someone who has the skills they need or someone with a degree?

For many roles, having a general degree doesn’t ensure the candidate will make a good employee. Though completion of a degree can demonstrate commitment and dedication to learning, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the applicant has the specific skills they actually need to do the job. With 4-year degree programs, time spent in gen-eds can take away from someone’s ability to gain real work experience and develop soft skills. Someone who is able to communicate and work well with others, can adapt to new tasks and environments, and pays attention to the smallest details of their work can be trained in technical or job-specific skills and will be an asset to any business.

While one can’t be said to be “better” than the other, hiring based on proven skills over a degree can help ensure that your new employee has what they need to be successful on the job from day one.

While 81% of employers believe organizations should hire based on skills, not degrees, according to a JFF report , many, if not most, are scared to make the leap toward actively hiring this way. 33% of those employers also think that the risk of hiring the wrong candidate for a job is a barrier to considering non-degree candidates.

But while there are many roles in which a degree is necessary for success on the job – you wouldn’t hire a doctor who didn’t complete medical school just because he has the skills to diagnose illnesses – there are even more that don’t. When considering what skills and knowledge someone needs to fill an open position, ask: can these skills be learned without going to college?

The answer will often be yes.

If that’s the case, you can determine who is qualified for a position through documented, relevant work experience, non-degree awarding certificate completion, or any post-secondary training that isn’t matriculation and graduation from college.

Further, it’s essential to update job posts to remove a degree from requirements for qualification. Besides opening hiring to more candidates, you’re likely to receive more applications from interested workers. Many strong prospective employees who have the skills you’re looking for but no degree would have passed by your job post in the past because of the degree requirement. Without one, you open yourself up to a wider talent pool to choose from.

And it’s important to remember when assessing job candidates that it’s the skills they have that matter, not how they attained them. When hiring and interviewing, focus on what they know not whether they attended a four-year college.

Even the largest companies – Apple, Google, Netflix - are focusing on skills-based hiring. More and more businesses are transitioning to skills-based hiring, too. The number of jobs in the United States that don’t require a degree has increased 40% since 2019 . But besides joining a workforce zeitgeist, there are several other reasons to shift to a skills-based hiring approach.

One pressing reason to shift how you think about hiring is the future workforce. As more Gen-Z begin to doubt the importance of a college degree and forgo that pathway altogether, instead choosing to pursue paths that lead to skills attainment, there will be more and more workers who don’t necessarily fit outdated job requirements. 74% of Gen-Z want to learn skills that will prepare them for in-demand jobs* in the future and college, they’ve realized, will not necessarily get them there.

Besides preparing for the future workforce, shifting to skills-based hiring is also beneficial for employers who’ve struggled to attract and retain workers in the last few years. With over 11 million job openings currently and less than 6 million workers available to fill them, it’s a fight to attract the right applicants and secure new hires. By being more open to assessing candidates based on what they know versus what school they paid exorbitant tuition to, you will attract a wider pool of job candidates and have more choices of applicants when filling open positions.

At the end of the day, the world of work is shifting, has been shifting since the pandemic, and will continue to do so as workers’ choices and concerns reshape the workforce. To make sure you’re not left behind, scrounging for employees that fit into degree-holding molds, it’s vital that you shift hiring practices to consider skills over degrees when relevant. Again, there are many roles that do require the knowledge that comes with a degree – doctors, engineers, architects – but there are many more jobs in which a person with simple soft skills, who is a good culture fit, can be trained to develop the skills you need post-hiring.

Also, it’s important to acknowledge that there are other paths toward skills attainment, including certificate programs, trade or technical schools, and job experience. Through focusing on skills-based hiring, your company can grow with talented, dedicated workers who know what they’re doing.

Even when hiring for skills over a degree, some talented employees may still need more training to gain industry specific knowledge, especially if they’re looking to advance within the company. Your business can create a strong, dedicated workforce and confident leaders by offering pathways toward further skills attainment with education benefits programs. With a trusted training provider like Penn Foster, you can offer education to upskill employees, from high school diploma offerings to bachelor’s degrees, or industry-relevant career training. If you’re ready to create a confident, skilled workforce, reach out to our training experts today to learn more about how you can build effective training and education programs for your company.

Source: https://info.jff.org/hubfs/ASA/ASA_JFF_White-Paper_final.pdf

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