Skills vs. Degrees: What You Need For a High Paying Job in the New Economy
There is a new global reality shaping the job market. And a university degree is becoming less and less a part of it, especially in creative and tech sectors.
Employers are looking for more than knowledge — they want skills. Even top-tier tech companies such as Google, Apple, and IBM no longer require a formal education for employment. For these and many others, a solid, skills-centered non-formal education is all that separates ambitious students from top-paying jobs. A formal education is no longer the best path to launching a successful career.
The reason is simple: formal education is falling behind what employers now need. For example, in Colorado, one of the most educated states in the US and with an unemployment rate of 2.7%, companies are actually turning away business because they can’t find people with the right skills. Similar stories are playing out all over the world. Plenty of jobs, but not enough people with the skills to fill them. Meanwhile, especially among old economy jobs, wage growth can’t keep up with inflation.
Some of the blame rests with universities. For generations, these institutions have decided when, where, and how students complete their own education. They’ve also been built around compliance, lectures, tests, and certificates, and students rarely acquire additional skills beyond the curriculum.
Meanwhile, because of efficiencies created by the internet and new techs such as automation and blockchain, the global economy will look completely different in the near future, and half of today’s jobs will cease to exist. What’s left will be “new collar” jobs that require skills most acquired through alternative pathways. And colleges aren’t built for it. The skills gap is a problem that requires everyone to rethink advanced education.
If not a university degree, then what?
It used to be a simple formula: IF I want a job WHEN I don’t have employable skills THEN just go to university. But companies are not looking at your diploma. They are looking at your skills and motivation. With new collar jobs such as programming and web development, if you have the skillset and can do, you’re hired. Diploma not needed.
In other words, the learning matters, not the certificate. Skills are your credits, not test grades. And you do it in a decentralized way.
The catch is, new collar jobs require self-directed learning, innovative thinking, and motivation. And since motivation is so important, strategic goal setting is absolutely necessary for any student. You can check out the if-when-then strategic approach in a previous article, which is at the core of everything we do.
So what’s next? Be prepared. With the growth of non-formal education programs and the demand from companies in need of the skills they provide, have no doubt that disruptive change in education is coming. We would argue it’s already here.
Non-formal education is a way to build the professional networks that you need to launch your career. Check us out at https://tapyournetwork.com/
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