email rounding up the latestEden Heath has a clutch of top grades in her A-levels and was head girl at the south-east London school where she just finished her final year. University would seem a no-brainer for her. But like many of her friends, she thinks it is a waste of money and only plans to go as a last resort.
Management professor Joseph Fuller, who co-leads Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future of Work programme, applauded companies widening recruitment beyond graduates. But he cautioned this was only a first step that would not change the behaviour of hiring managers. This is despite an increase in the number of graduates, which could potentially dilute a degree’s value on the jobs market. In the US, 51 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds were college graduates in 2021, compared with 38 per cent in 2000; in the UK, 57 per cent of young adults were university educated in 2021, up from 29 per cent two decades ago.
The proportion of high-skilled roles, which involve complex tasks and require high levels of education or training, have grown in developed economies for more than three decades, according to the International Labour Organization. In the US, for example, two-thirds of production supervisor roles asked for a college degree in 2015, despite only 16 per cent of people already in the role having one, according to a Harvard Business School study. It found this resulted in posts being harder to fill, higher staff turnover rates, and more expensive hires, leading to worse outcomes for companies.
IBM started hiring apprentices in 2010 as part of a wider expansion of non-graduate recruitment. Degrees are required for just 12 per cent of advertised UK positions and less than half of those in the US, the company said. “We wanted to remove barriers that were precluding people with the skills and potential to succeed,” Claire Thomas, director of organisational development at the company, said.Almost a quarter of jobs will be disrupted in the next five years, according to employers. Lower-skilled roles are most at risk, but it expected transferable skills such as creative and analytical thinking to increase in importance.