Fewer Job Posts Now Require Degrees. How Has That Changed Hiring?
“Skills, not schools,” is more than a catchy slogan — it captures a real preference in how talent professionals advertise jobs and source passive candidates. For instance, those with paid Recruiter licenses on LinkedIn tend to search for candidates by their skills five times more often than they search for candidates by their degrees.
And, as a new multilingual analysis of LinkedIn job posts reveals, employers are increasingly advertising roles without professional degree requirements.
But here’s the critical question: Does dropping degree requirements actually translate into more hires of workers who don’t hold degrees?
As we’ll see, the answer for many industries and functions is “no.” While many have started to “talk the talk” of skills-first hiring, relatively few are managing to “walk the walk.”
In fact, some of the spaces with the greatest increase in degree-less job posts (for example, the tech industry) are actually seeing some of the smallest growth in new hires without professional degrees.
Read on to get a clearer understanding of how professional degree requirements are changing — and where employers are really making the most headway on hiring folks without higher degrees.
Professional degree requirements are becoming less common
Four years ago, throughout 2019, a little over 20% of paid job posts on LinkedIn did not require a professional degree. (For this analysis, “professional degree” means any postsecondary degree beyond an associate’s — see the methodology at the end of the story for full details.)
In the space of just a few years, that share has grown significantly. Across the full year of 2022, almost 30% of paid job posts omitted any such degree requirements.
That jump, from roughly 21% of all job posts to 29% in three years, represents a +36% increase in jobs listed without professional degree requirements.
That’s certainly a positive development — skills-first hiring practices can help boost quality of hire, expand your talent pool, and reduce bias while increasing diversity.
That said, the data above paints the picture with quite a broad brush.
Let’s take a closer look at how different industries and types of jobs are experiencing this shift in job posting activity, before turning to look at the actual hires being made across sectors and functions.
Here’s where job posts that don’t require professional degrees are growing faster than job posts that do
For the rest of this analysis, we’ll be comparing the growth in job posts that don’t require degrees against the growth of job posts that do. Crucially, this does not mean that degree-less job listings comprise most of the job posts in these spaces.
Instead, it means things are moving in the right direction: degree-less posts are growing at a rate that’s faster than the growth of those job posts that do require professional degrees.
The shift away from such requirements is not uniform across all industries. In some sectors, the change is happening at a rapid pace, while others are lagging behind.
Financial services, food services, and tech industries are leading the charge, where job posts without degree requirements are growing several times faster than stricter job listings.
Companies in the tech industry and those offering tech-related engineering jobs tend to be among the most vocal advocates of the “skills, not schools” ethos — fueled perhaps by talent shortages in the tech space and the rise of self-learning resources.
That throughline carries over when we look at specific job functions too, as engineering jobs without degree requirements have grown 68% faster than those with them.
That said, accounting and administrative roles are seeing even stronger gains than those in engineering. Accounting in particular is seeing a massive shift, with job posts without degree requirements growing 5.5x faster than those with requirements. This underscores the growing recognition that skills and experience can often outweigh formal education in these fields.
Here’s where employers are actually hiring more workers without professional degrees
But what about the actual hires? Are industries that are advertising more degree-less jobs also hiring more workers without professional degrees?
The answer is mixed. First, let’s take a second look at the top three industries in the job posting category and see how their actual hiring practices hold up.
Accommodation and food service hires without professional degrees have grown 11% faster than those with them — a number that’s dwarfed by the 354% faster increase in job posts, but still a fair bit better than many other industries. The growth of degree-less hires in financial services is only outpacing the growth of degreed hires by 6%.
Finally, the technology, information, and media industry has only seen hires grow 3% faster — well short of the 240% faster growth rate of job posts without degree requirements.
Some industries, however, are indeed hiring more workers without professional degrees — like consumer services, entertainment, and government. Across all three of these top industries, project manager and administrative assistant were among the top five occupations filled by hires without professional degrees.
similarly mixed picture emerges when we look at specific job functions. Community and social services, media and communication, and legal functions are seeing a modest increase in hires without professional degrees relative to hires with such degrees.
While the legal function might be surprising, given the emphasis on expertise and credentialism in the field, the growth could be due to positions like paralegals, who often only require an associate’s degree or a paralegal certification. Indeed, the growth of legal specialists hired without professional degrees (from 2019 to 2022) is more than double the growth of legal specialists hired with degrees during the same time period.
Final thoughts
Overall, the change in actual hires is far less dramatic than the change in job postings. This suggests that while the intention to hire based on skills is there, the actual hiring practices may still be influenced by traditional degree requirements.
This data paints a checkered picture of a job market in transition. While the move toward “skills, not schools” is evident in job postings, the actual hiring behaviors haven’t necessarily caught up.
Of course, it’s not realistic or even desirable that changes in hires would mirror changes in job posts on a 1:1 basis. Candidates who happen to have professional degrees can also have the right set of skills; if 100% of job posts removed degree requirements, employers wouldn’t exclusively hire people without degrees.
That said, the difference between a +240% faster growth rate in degree-less job posts and a +3% faster growth rate in degree-less hires still represents a stark disparity that could be improved.
This may suggest a breakdown between recruiters and hiring managers: While recruiters are increasingly searching for candidates by skills, rather than degrees, and degree requirements are disappearing from many job posts, it seems that hiring managers — who typically make the final hiring decision — are still predominantly hiring those with professional degrees, whether or not that’s actually required for the job.
Recruiters will need to partner with hiring managers as strategic advisors to effect real changes in hiring practices. It’s a reminder that making a difference takes time and effort — and that talking the talk is just the first step.
This story was coauthored by Senior Insights Analyst Adriana Zurbano and Senior Content Marketing Manager Greg Lewis.
Methodology
This analysis covers LinkedIn’s paid job postings from 2019 and 2022. Text mining was used to analyze job descriptions for common U.S. keywords that indicated a professional degree wasn’t required (including no degree, no college, no education, GED, general education degree, high school degree, high school diploma, high school graduate, high school level, associate degree, associate’s degree) and translations in Spanish, French, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, German, Portuguese, Turkish, and Chinese were included to provide a more global perspective. Note: There may be job postings where professional degree requirements were unknown that were included in this analysis.
To understand potential changes in job posting behavior from 2019 to 2022, we analyzed the subset of companies that posted jobs in both 2019 and 2022. While we observed growth in overall job posting volume and candidate engagement from 2019 to 2022 by the same companies, we simultaneously determined that there was growth in the share of postings and engagement with jobs that did not require a professional degree by these same companies to further substantiate our analysis.
This analysis also covers LinkedIn data to determine the highest degree held by members at the time of hiring from 2019 to 2022. LinkedIn members that have not entered degree information on their profile were excluded from this analysis.
