One upside of the bad labor shortage: Businesses are starting to drop the ridiculous requirement that workers have to possess a college degree of some kind:
The tight labor market is prompting more employers to eliminate one of the biggest requirements for many higher-paying jobs: the need for a college degree.
Companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Delta Air Lines Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. have reduced educational requirements for certain positions and shifted hiring to focus more on skills and experience. Maryland this year cut college-degree requirements for many state jobs — leading to a surge in hiring — and incoming Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro campaigned on a similar initiative.
You can't really blame them. If a worker comes to your door these days, you give him a quick once-over and then you snatch him right up.
I mean, it makes sense to abandon that requirement. Nominally, employers have thought that college degrees represent a good indicator of a worker's ability to actually do work. But more and more of them are recognizing that that's simply not true:
"We don't require degrees for most of our jobs in the field and increasingly in the home office as well," Kathleen McLaughlin, Walmart executive vice president, said at an online event this fall. The company's goal is to shift the "focus from the way someone got their skills, which is the degree, to what skills do they have."
