Tech firms placing more emphasis on skills than degrees

ROCKET CENTER, W.VA. — A few years ago, Sean Bridges lived with his mother, Linda, in Wiley Ford, W. Va. Their only income was her monthly Social Security disability check. Bridges applied for work at Walmart and Burger King, but they were not hiring.

Yet while Bridges had no work history, he had certain skills. He had built and sold some strippeddown personal computers, and he had studied information technology at a community college. When Bridges heard that IBM was hiring at a nearby operations center in 2013, he applied and demonstrated those skills.

Now Bridges, 25, is a computer security analyst, making $45,000 a year. In a struggling Appalachian economy, that is enough to provide him with his own apartment, a car, spending money — and career ambitions.

“I got one big break,” he said. “That’s what I needed.”

Bridges represents a new but promising category in the U.S. labor market: people working in new-collar or middle-skill jobs. As the United States struggles with how to match good jobs to the two-thirds of adults who do not have a four-year college degree, his experience shows how a worker’s skills can be emphasized over traditional hiring filters such as college degrees, work history and personal references.

And elevating skills over pedigree creates new pathways to employment and tailored training and a gateway to the middle class.

This skills-based jobs approach matters at a time when there is a push to improve the circumstances of those left behind in the U.S. economy, many of whom voted for President Donald Trump.

“We desperately need to revive a second route to the middle class for people without four-year college degrees, as manufacturing once was,” said Robert Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration and is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “We have to move toward a system that works.”

The skills-based concept is gaining momentum, with nonprofit organizations, schools, state governments and companies, typically in partnerships, beginning to roll out such efforts. Last month, the approach received a strong corporate endorsement from Microsoft, which announced a grant of more than $25 million to help Skillful, a program to foster skills-oriented hiring, training and education. The initiative, led by the Markle Foundation, began last year in Colorado, and Microsoft’s grant will be used to expand it there and move it into other states.

“We need new approaches, or we’re going to leave more and more people behind in our economy,” said Brad Smith, president of Microsoft.

It is unclear whether a relative handful of skills-centered initiatives can train large numbers of people and alter hiring practices broadly. But the skills-based approach has already yielded some early and encouraging results in the technology industry, which may provide a model for other industries.

These jobs have taken off in tech for two main reasons. For one, computing skills tend to be well defined. Writing code, for example, is a specific task, and success or failure can be tested and measured. At the same time, the demand for tech skills is surging.

One tech project that has expanded rapidly is TechHire, which was created in 2015 and is the flagship program of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit social enterprise. TechHire provides grants and expertise to train workers around the country and link them to jobs by nurturing local networks of job seekers, trainers and companies.

In just two years, TechHire’s network has grown to 72 communities, 237 training organizations and 1,300 employers. It has helped place more than 4,000 workers in jobs.

Byron Auguste, president of Opportunity@Work, says TechHire’s mission is partly to chip away at “the cultural hegemony of the bachelor’s degree.”