Traditional hiring approaches that prioritize higher education are changing. Because both the market and demand for candidates' skills are changing very fast. Modern businesses pay less and less attention to titles or university names, and more and more to real skills. This approach is called skills-first hiring. Let's take a closer look at this phenomenon.

Where this approach works and where it doesn't

In tightly regulated industries (banking, medicine, law), a degree is often not a matter of choice, but a requirement of the law or licensing, so the skills-first approach doesn't apply there yet. But in tech, marketing, and design, there are no such barriers, and it's easier to evaluate by skills rather than by degree.

According to TestGorilla, the share of employers using skills-based hiring is growing, for example, from 56% in 2022 to 73% in 2023 and 81% in 2024. According to Indeed Hiring Lab, formal education requirements have decreased across 87% of occupational sectors over the past five years.

Still, research from Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute revealed a gap between what companies say and what they actually do. Even among firms that publicly dropped degree requirements, the real effect on hiring turned out to be very small — such companies accounted for fewer than 1 in 700 hires in 2023. Simply removing the requirement from a job posting doesn't always open doors to people without a degree, inertia in hiring is still strong, but the situation is changing. And tech giants take an optimistic view of alternatives to a classic higher education. For example, Apple, General Motors, Koch Industries, Target, Walmart, and Yelp on average hired 18% more workers without a higher education degree over the past 10 years.

IBM is creating many jobs for workers without a higher education degree, and also developing its own certificates and professional training programs. According to their data, the share of IBM employees hired in the US without a higher education degree is approaching 20%.

Attitudes are changing too

This is a curious trend that we're following, and it fits into a bigger picture. According to Gallup, the share of Americans who consider higher education very important dropped to 35% in 2025 — a historic low over 15 years of observation. For comparison, in 2010, 75% thought so. And confidence in higher education institutions fell from 57% in 2015 to just 38% by July 2026. 

Our approach

At Smart State, we don't pretend that a degree means nothing. Sometimes it really matters, especially if it's a law requirement, not a choice of the company. A degree might show something: persistence, foundation, ability to see a long process through. Or it might not show that. That's why what matters more to us is what a person can actually do, and we look not at the paper, but at the person behind it. We follow a Human First approach — because people are our main asset. Feel free to apply for our jobs, even if you don't have a degree: smartstate.com/jobs