Is it so important to have a college degree for a successful career in a company with a world name? Recently, no! Google, Apple, IBM, consulting company Ernst & Young, Hilton hotel chain, Starbucks said they are ready to take on some of the positions of applicants who do not have a college degree.
Moreover, these vacancies are quite tasty: Google is ready to hire product managers, developers, recruiters and researchers without a college degree. Ernst & Young has open positions for a risk adviser, a client experience manager, an auditor, a tax specialist, and others.
And this is not only an American trend. The wind of change reached Europe.
The largest Eastern European job search portal has removed the “education” column from the vacancy posting form. The reason was simply explained – the graph has long been unpopular and no one is looking at it.
How to explain what is happening? Top executives and experts shared their opinions.
“People who do not study at the university and themselves make their way in life are exceptional beings. And we must do everything what we can to find such people, ”said Laszlo Bok, former head of the recruitment department at Google.
“Academic education is still being taken into account and remains an important point when deciding on the admission of a candidate as a whole, but it is no longer an obstacle to at least push your foot in the door,” says Maggie Stillwell, managing talent partner at Ernst and Young.
“Now they are checking: wit, consistency, quick learner, character, creativity and a couple more parameters to your taste. This is more important! Companies realized that to stupid brains at universities for 5 long years is an unaffordable luxury. The information has become so fast that both professors and students do not have time to reboot their brains, ”says Vladimir Spivakovsky, a scientist, blogger and author of the Edu Future 7W educational platform.
The conclusion is coming itself: collapsing university education that has become clumsy. And new technologies appear faster than we manage to get acquainted with them, which means that obtaining new working skills becomes a continuous process. It turns out that we now have to receive education throughout our life, and not only at the institute. Moreover, an employee who has acquired knowledge and competencies on his own is much more valuable than the one to whom university professors have put all this into their heads.
It is interesting, will universities be able to adapt to new trends, or will fall behind?