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With more organizations seeking to evolve talent practices around skills, this new paper from the World Governments Summit, produced with PwC, offers ideas for moving beyond degree-only talent signals toward a more skills-focused approach where people build and prove skills over time through smaller credentials that build on each other. One idea in the report is to treat degrees as one signal, not the signal, while increasingly embracing skills-based hiring that prioritizes candidates’ skills over traditional credentials. This connects to a question I’ve raised several times: as more firms remove degree requirements from job postings, are they truly hiring more candidates without degrees? Research from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute shows that simply dropping degree requirements has limited impact unless organizations also redesign role requirements, candidate evaluation, and hiring practices. One way to do this is to stress-test degree requirements against specific roles and lines of work. To support this effort, I’m resharing my one‑page cheat sheet with nine skills-based hiring questions to help make these decisions more intentional.
