No degree required: Canva, WiseTech and Culture Amp’s new workforce

“For us, it’s less about where you went to school, or what you studied, and more about the skills that you can bring to the table, the experiences that you’ve had and the values that you have,” Anderson says.

Focusing on skills instead of restrictive educational criteria has helped the company find more suitable candidates. It has also empowered managers to recruit employees into different roles across the business based on their skills rather than their professional backgrounds.

This all feeds into a broader company commitment to lifelong learning that encourages staff to see their careers like “rock climbing walls”, rather than ladders.

“You can move across it, and you can move up and down and around and have all of these different experiences,” Anderson says, adding that this model helps keep workers engaged and inspired to do their best work.

“It’s not, ‘what is the next rung [in the ladder] that I’m going for?’ It’s equally respected to go [sideways].”

Like Canva, Culture Amp and WiseTech also claim recent improvements in their workforce diversity were partly driven by the decision to drop degree requirements from most roles.

Culture Amp dropped degree requirements from its job ads about six years ago, except in legal positions and other regulated roles for which educational requirements were mandatory.

Alongside the diversity benefits, the company prefers to test whether job candidates have the skills needed to perform a given role, rather than using degrees as proxies for these skills.

“When you look at study after study, it shows that [having a degree] is actually one of the weakest predictors of skill,” says chief people officer Justin Angsuwat. “So, instead of using degrees as a proxy, just test for the skill.”

Diversity boosts innovation

Meanwhile, WiseTech Global head of talent Angelina McMenamin says recent improvements in workforce diversity have translated into more effective problem-solving at the software company.

“This is important, as at our heart, we are a product-led company with 62 per cent of our global workforce – and almost two-thirds of our Australian team – in technical roles that produce world-class software code that solves global problems for the international logistics industry,” McMenamin says.

She tells BOSS that breakthroughs often come when people with different skill sets and backgrounds come together, as this helps teams find new ways of solving old problems.

“Actually, our CEO, Richard White, didn’t have a degree when he founded the company,” she says, when noting a skills-first approach is embedded within WiseTech’s culture.

“He understands that there are many career pathways – his own includes rock musician and guitar repairer to self-taught software engineer, then CEO and founder, STEM education advocate and philanthropist.”

Degrees are struggling to keep up

Jonathan Tabah, a director in consultancy Gartner’s HR practice, says he’s observed an uptick in companies dropping degree requirements from job ads.

He tells BOSS the rapid pace of change in today’s economy means asking candidates to get a three-year degree no longer ensures they have the skills required to do their jobs. The mix of skills required to perform a given role is changing so quickly that universities are struggling to keep up.

”[Organisations are] recognising that this rapidly evolving skills reality means that they can no longer rely on their traditional approaches to ensure they’re hiring employees with the right capabilities,” Tabah says.

When asked about the trend, Vicki Thomson, chief executive of the Group of Eight – the peak group for Australia’s largest, most research-intensive and highest-ranked universities – acknowledges a university education isn’t a must-have for everyone. But she says people still need the advanced skills that are taught on campus.

“It’s not a case of one size fits all,” Thomson says. “That was an important part of the [Australian Universities] Accord: creating a seamless tertiary education sector in which universities and VET [vocational education and training] work together to deliver the skilled workforce the nation needs.”

It’s also unclear whether dropping degree requirements from job ads actually increases the share of people without degrees landing a job.

Limited real-world impact

In the US, a report this year by the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School found an almost fourfold increase in the annual number of roles from which employers eliminated degree requirements between 2014 and last year.

But the researchers suggested this had limited real-world impact: an analysis of 11,300 roles at large firms found that employers, on average, increased the share of workers without a bachelor’s degree recruited into these roles by just 3.5 percentage points – and not all of that was down to the adoption of skills-first hiring.

“When considering that this 3.5-point shift applies only to the 3.6 per cent of roles that dropped a requirement during that time, the net effect is a change of only 0.14 percentage points in incremental hiring of candidates without degrees,” they said.

“Put differently, for all its fanfare, the increased opportunity promised by skills-based hiring has borne out in not even 1 in 700 hires last year,” the researchers said.