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For years, the IT industry has been beset by chronic talent shortages. According to some estimates, there are currently over 450,000 open cybersecurity jobs.
This has been worsened by the widening gap between available vacancies and individuals looking for new jobs. In February, there were 11.27 million job vacancies versus 6.27 million unemployed people.
As a result, according to recent Harvard Business Review research, a rising number of organizations, including many in the technology sector, are eliminating the requirement for a bachelor's degree.
This reverses a long-standing trend in which degree requirements were added to job descriptions when not really required to perform the tasks of the position, otherwise known as degree inflation.
In fact, now to broaden the talent pool, many organizations are focusing on skills-based hiring rather than four-year degree requirements.
For example, only 26% of Accenture's job advertisements for a software quality-assurance engineer required a bachelor's degree. Only 29% at IBM did.
In fact, currently, only half of IBM's job postings in the United States require a four-year degree.
The trend is becoming widespread. The White House declared in January 2021 that its hiring for IT positions no longer will be heavily based on four-year degrees as employment qualifications.
The majority of Bank of America's entry-level employment no longer requires a college diploma, according to the corporation.
Accenture started an apprenticeship program in 2016 and has since hired 1,200 people, with 80 percent of them having no college diploma.
To get access to a larger talent pool, Okta, a firm that provides secure access solutions to corporate applications, eliminated the requirement for a college degree for a many of its sales positions focusing instead on motivation, talent, and experience.
Finally, in order to get the talent it requires, Dell Technologies last year broadened its definition of university recruitment and created a community college hiring program.
