Job review site Glassdoor compiled a list of 15 different companies which don’t require job candidate applicants to have college degrees. This list includes high-paying tech outlets like Apple, Google, and IBM in addition to service-oriented companies like Costco, Chipotle, and Starbucks.
Apple, IBM, and Google don’t require a college degree
It is more surprising while many companies still insist upon a degree in first place while these giants don’t require a four-year degree as a qualification and it might feel like a dramatic break.
“Academic qualifications will still be taken into account and indeed remain an important consideration when assessing candidates as a whole, but will no longer act as a barrier to getting a foot in the door,” Maggie Stilwell, Ernst and Young’s managing partner for talent, told the Huffington Post when that company dropped the requirement.
In other words: Companies will hire the candidates whose experience and skills best suit them for the job. Many of those successful applicants will have university degrees. Some of them will not.
Google acknowledged several years ago that college transcripts and test scores are worthless when it comes to later on-job performance. At IBM roughly 15% of new hires in the US don’t have college degrees, CEO of IBM Ginni Rometty said vocational courses and on-job experience offer more relevant training for tech sectors compared to a four-year college degree.
It not that these college degrees are completely worthless. Many peoples acquire skills from universities. But the challenge is when people get the same skill by other means of learning and become more competent.
Which hypothetical resume offers a more convincing case for a candidate’s work ethic or motivation: one from a recent college graduate who majored in computer science, or that of a self-taught coder who acquired those same skills while also managing full-time employment? What a person knows is more important than how they learned it.