Originally posted in our August 2022 Top of Mind Newsletter.
Thinking about the tumultuous changes to education, one might naturally consider how this impacts the job market. As has been reported for several years, jobs increasingly care about skills, mindsets, and experience over holding a particular degree. In this recent article from the Washington Post, we see an examination of the recent trend of ditching the degree requirement in a variety of fields, namely IT.
What’s clear in the article is that skills reign supreme, and while there is some value in a four-year degree, it is diminishing. This diminishing value is, in some ways, replaced by new flexibility in the workforce. This is flexibility framed by one’s ability to choose a new path, build new skills relatively quickly, and find a job that suits their interests or allows one to earn more than they were previously.
But how are our overall systems of education organized to enable this era of skill development? As we saw previously, not very well. So, what is to be done?