Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has three advanced degrees and directs an academic think tank at Stanford. She’s also the newest advocate for skills-based hiring.
This month Rice told Fortune Magazine that the U.S. needs to make “a lot more use” of programs that allow people without four-year degrees to step into good jobs, and she made a compelling case.
Rice noted that Americans currently owe $1.78 trillion in student loan debt, and that switching to skills-based hiring will keep people from having to go into debt they can’t pay back. It will also help companies significantly expand their applicant pools, which is essential to keep companies going and growing in the face of a talent shortage.
There’s also considerable evidence that employees with the right skills do just as well as employees with the right degrees. Studies at IBM showed that skills-based hires performed just as well as employees with PhDs. General Motors conducted a similar experiment, and found comparable results.
The need for tech workers is growing in every industry: skills based hiring is a way of getting the workers businesses need into the jobs workers want. That’s why it’s a growing movement.
We have every reason to believe that more academic and public policy experts like Dr. Rice will be joining it, and the way hiring is done will change.
