A degree isn’t a must for us. Next-gen skills are moving faster than universities can teach them

At Remote, when hiring — 1) We don’t require degrees. 2) Or “years of experience”, either.

Recently, we made that clearer in our public documentation, spelling out what’s been true since day one: we hire for ability, not academic pedigree.

Some roles will always need specific credentials (doctors need medical degrees, obviously). But for jobs that don’t, a formal degree is not our benchmark for skill, intelligence, or potential.

Especially for roles immersed in AI and new tech, where the degree market just hasn’t kept up. A degree still has value, the work that goes into them is impressive. But it’s no longer the clearest signal of a person’s potential in the workforce.

The pace of AI learning already outstrips most formal education

The faster new tech innovates, the less reliable degrees become as a proxy for being able to jump right in. By 2024, the average skill set for a job had changed by about 25% since 2015, and was expected to change by 65%, by 2030.

AI literacy is now among the most in-demand job skills, but few degree programs provide this. If they do, said skills might be outdated by the time those enrolled graduate, because AI moved on swiftly in the meantime.

A 2023 Deloitte-based survey found that 71% of Gen Z workers are already using generative AI on the job, compared to 49% of millennials, and just 29% of Gen X. It’s unlikely that across each group, this familiarity was purpose taught at degree level. Plus, over half of U.S. graduates say their degree didn’t prepare them for work, more broadly.

Universities are lagging at future-proofing graduates

The gap tends to show up more starkly in fast-advancing areas like tech, where new tools outpace the speed of traditional education rapidly. Self-taught developers, independent learners, and those working with AI tools on the ground may be stronger candidates for a particular role than peers who studied those subjects years ago.

Your next best hire could be self taught

Dropping degree requirements is actually great for business. Expand your talent pool, move faster on hiring, and bring in hard-to-find skills.

Plus, it helps teams fill roles that are shapeshifting faster than universities can adapt. Harvard’s research found that in companies using skills-based hiring effectively, non-degree hires stayed longer — with retention rates 10 percentage points higher than their degree-holding peers. This way of hiring is better for candidates too, especially those who’ve been shut out by systemic barriers. Globally, access to college is still shaped by race, income, language, and location. Talent is everywhere, but opportunity often isn’t. Removing formal education blockers opens companies up to people with drive, adaptability, and sharp instincts, graduate or not.

The skills-based hiring state of mind has caught on

We put the data into practice, but it’s not just us. Degree mentions are disappearing from job ads generally. Between 2014 and 2023, Harvard Business School and the Burning Glass Institute found the number of open job roles without degree requirements increased almost four times over.

That’s a notable number of employers shifting from a focus on formal education, to skills.

From big tech to retail giants, and the state sector

Employers like IBM, Walmart, Google, and several U.S. state governments have dropped degree requirements from select roles. Not necessarily to advance equity, but often just to find qualified candidates faster. A practical move to solve hiring gaps more than anything else, not an ideological choice.

Since 2022, states including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Utah, Colorado, New Jersey, and Alaska have removed bachelor’s degree requirements from thousands of public-sector roles. In Maryland alone, the policy change opened up more than 38,000 jobs to candidates without four-year degrees. The motivations vary — some state leaders cited talent shortages, while others pointed to underused pools of workers with skills but no formal credentials.

Maryland was also one of the first to implement the change, backed by Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit that supports STARs (workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes), and advocates for skills-based hiring across sectors. Some leaders framed the shift as a push for access.

Either way, the data speaks for itself. When employers drop degree filters, more people get through the door, especially those who’ve learned by doing, not just studying.

Most candidates will have degrees, ditch the requirement anyway

While it’s a start, dropping degree mentions from job posts is only surface level. Research from Harvard Business School — analyzing 11,300 roles between 2014 and 2023 — found that even after a nearly fourfold increase in roles dropping degree requirements, actual hiring of non-degree candidates rose only modestly.

In fact, fewer than 1 in 700 new hires could be attributed to those changes, unless companies rethought how they evaluated candidates from the ground up.

This type of rethink won’t suddenly mean most hires will come from non-degree backgrounds. At Remote, it’s still true that most of our workforce is degree educated. Access to higher education still shapes who gets the time, resources, and networks to keep building new skills.

Rather than devaluing formal higher ed, skills-based hiring stops dismissing candidates who’ve built strong skills without it. With a Master of Science (MSc) in Computer and Telematics Engineering, I know and appreciate the value of formal education. But I also know it isn’t the only way, or necessarily the fastest way to gain sought after, emerging skills – anymore, at least.

Out: textbook regurgitation. In: outpacing the coursework

Here, we hire based on our values because that’s how we actually work together. This means looking for people who work with curiosity, who can take ownership and initiative, give and receive feedback with clarity (not ego), and aren’t afraid to test an unconventional idea.

At Remote, we care about capability. We look at how people solve problems, how they collaborate, and how they’re learning now (no matter how cool their dissertation topic was).

Credentials can’t predict adaptability. Skills are the better gamble. We’re all racing to build stellar teams with emerging tech know-how. So hire for how people think, how they already innovate using new tech, not simply what they studied.

This is how we hire at Remote, and how we think more companies could successfully, too.