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The Fourth Annual Energy Policy Conference, October 15, 2024 REGISTER

Formal education requirements are gradually disappearing from job postings as more employers are leaning into “skills first” hiring practices, according to a new report from Indeed’s Hiring Lab. 

The report, released Feb. 27, found employers are loosening their formal education requirements as the labor market remains tight and as attitudes toward skills-first hiring practices change. Those same employers seem more willing to consider candidates who can demonstrate the required skills without necessarily having a degree.  

Key findings include: 

  • A majority (52%) of US job postings on Indeed did not mention any formal education requirement as of January 2024, up from 48% at the same time in 2019.  
  • The share of US job postings requiring at least a college degree fell from 20.4% to 17.8% in the last five years, opening opportunities for the 64% of U.S. adults without a bachelor’s degree. 
  • Formal educational requirements are declining in nearly every sector, and mentions of college degrees have fallen since 2019 in 87% of occupational groups analyzed by Indeed. 

“Formal educational requirements are unlikely to disappear entirely from job postings, especially in areas like healthcare and engineering that require a good deal of post-secondary knowledge and skills,” wrote the report’s author, Cory Stahle, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. 

“However, a shrinking pool of job postings requiring applicants to first hold a formal degree as an employment condition represents a major opportunity for the roughly two-thirds of Americans without a four-year degree,” Stahle said. 

Historically, employers have used the earning of an academic degree as a measure of an applicant’s skills and ability to do the job at hand. However, developments in software as a service (SaaS) technologies and pre-employment testing have helped give employers the tools they need to adopt skills-first hiring approaches and expand their candidate pools beyond the limited number of Americans with college degrees, the report said.