On career sites like ZipRecruiter, less than 15% of jobs list a bachelor's degree as a requirement for employment.

Employers across a range of industries are dropping a job requirement once considered a ticket to a higher paying job and financial security: a college degree.

Today’s tight labor market has led more companies instead to take a more skills-based approach to hiring, as evidenced on job search sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter.

“Part of it is employers realizing they may be able to do a better job finding the right talent by looking for the skills or competencies someone needs to do the job and not letting a degree get in the way of that,” Parisa Fatehi-Weeks, senior director of environmental, social and governance (ESG) for hiring platform Indeed told CBS MoneyWatch.

  • danhab99
    143·
    11 months ago

    I’m a programmer and I don’t think I’ve ever been asked about my education… not that I have much I’m mostly self taught. Even so, I can’t imagine what more education could give me to show in an interview.

    The opensource community changes SOP for all of us basically every quarter so how is my education supposed to keep up with that?

    • frogfruit
      15·
      11 months ago

      The trick is that you have experience. Without years of experience, it’s extremely difficult to get hired without a degree.

    • WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      11 months ago

      What is the best way to teach yourself programming? I love tinkering with technology systems in my home, and have often thought about how writing simple programs could unleash some extra potential, but I don’t know where to start.

      • danhab99
        1·
        11 months ago

        We programmers share our knowledge freely in user manuals, tutorials, articles and YouTube videos.

        But in my experience the only thing that I see slowing down new programmers is motivation. You can’t really learn code without having a reason to apply what you’ve learned. You have to come up with a reason first, That’s my best advice.

        • WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          11 months ago

          I have ideas of things to do, but since I am starting from 0, I don’t even know what language to aim for, or what is a reasonable project to start with. I feel like I could definitely figure things out on my own from tutorials if I just had some basic primer about what’s out there and what things are typically designed to do.

          I don’t know what I don’t know, so it is hard to know what questions I need to ask.

          • danhab99
            1·
            11 months ago

            I have ideas of things to do, but since I am starting from 0

            Perfect! You’ve taken the hardest step. I can give you advice from here.

            Computers only really do 3 types of work, there can be more but most can be summarized like this:

            • Displaying things on screen: this only ever happens on the end user’s device. React and React native are the best options for that.
            • Copying data from one spot to the next: simple operations to get data from one location, reencode it and send it somewhere else, wether to the end user’s device or another database its all the same work. Typescript is best suited for that.
            • Hard work: processing large blobs of data like reencoding pictures and videos, consuming megabytes of data at a time and running a calculation. Go is best suited for that.
            • WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              1·
              11 months ago

              Thank you so much for your responses! I feel a lot more encouraged after this conversation. You never know how the seeds you plant may grow—and you’ve definitely planted one today.

              I think I’ll start with some basic move and rename stuff since that would save me some manual work, and then I’ll see how I can grow from there.