Stop Requiring Degrees for Jobs That Don't Need Them

Michael Timmons

Aug 22

5 min read

For decades, companies have used college degrees as a shortcut for determining whether someone is qualified.

Bachelor's degree required. Master's degree preferred.

But here's the problem: a four-year degree doesn't automatically make someone more qualified to lead a team, sell a product, build a business, manage an operation, market to a customer/consumer, or understand a customer.

In many cases, requiring a degree may actually eliminate some of the best candidates before you ever get the opportunity to meet them.

By setting your hiring parameters to "Bachelor's degree required" or "Master's degree required," you could be cutting out a huge percentage of talented salespeople, entrepreneurs, operators, technicians, marketers, and business leaders who built their careers through experience instead of textbooks.

And that deserves a serious conversation.

Experience Is an Education

There are many ways to become educated.

College is one of them.

Trade school is another.

Military service is another.

Starting a business is another.

Working your way from the warehouse floor into management is another.

Spending 15 years selling directly to customers, managing accounts, solving problems, negotiating contracts, and building relationships is absolutely an education.

The classroom teaches important concepts. But the workplace teaches lessons that can be extremely difficult to replicate in a lecture hall.

You learn what happens when a customer is angry.

You learn how to motivate an employee who has lost confidence.

You learn how to negotiate when millions of dollars are sitting on the table.

You learn what happens when inventory doesn't arrive, sales decline, a product fails, or a competitor suddenly cuts pricing.

You learn how people behave. Not just how a textbook says they should behave.

That experience has tremendous value. More value than any textbook.

Some of the Best Salespeople Operate on Instinct

Sales is a perfect example.

Some of the most successful salespeople I have worked with have an incredible ability to read people.

They understand tone.

They recognize hesitation.

They know when to continue selling and when to stop talking.

They understand relationships, timing, trust, and human behavior.

You can teach someone sales processes, CRM systems, product knowledge, and forecasting.

It is much harder to teach instinct.

Great salespeople often develop that instinct through thousands of conversations, customer meetings, objections, negotiations, wins, and losses.

Requiring a bachelor's degree for that position doesn't necessarily tell you whether the person can sell.

Their track record probably does.

Entrepreneurs Often Learn by Doing

The same argument applies to entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are often forced to learn nearly every part of a business.

Sales. Marketing. Operations. Finance. Product development. Customer service. Hiring. Inventory. Cash flow.

Sometimes all in the same week.

They may not have learned those subjects from a professor, but they learned them with their own money, reputation, employees, and business on the line.

That kind of education can be incredibly powerful and is considered a business-life experience.

Business instinct frequently comes from being put in difficult situations and having to make decisions with incomplete information.

You cannot always teach that from a book or sitting in a classroom.

Trade Schools Deserve More Respect

We also need to stop treating trade schools as a secondary option.

For many careers, technical education provides exactly what employers claim they want: job-ready skills.

A student attending welding school, automotive technical school, machine school, electrical training, or another skilled-trade program may spend hundreds or thousands of hours physically performing the work.

They aren't only studying theory.

They're doing it.

Meanwhile, companies sometimes require four-year degrees for technical or operational positions even when the degree has very little connection to the actual job.

That makes little sense.

If you're hiring someone to solve a technical problem, shouldn't the ability to solve the technical problem matter more than where they went to school?

I've heard people say, “But a college degree shows you committed to something long term." So does starting your own business at 16, selling it at 18, then selling another business at 22, and then another at 25. It's called being an entrepreneur and shows more about a person's abilities to grow companies than a 4-year degree.

A Diploma doesn't determine Leadership.

Leadership may be one of the biggest areas where companies need to rethink degree requirements.

A degree does not automatically teach someone how to lead people.

Leadership requires communication, accountability, decision-making, emotional intelligence, judgment, consistency, and trust.

Those skills are frequently developed through years of responsibility.

A person who has spent 20 years building teams, developing employees, managing budgets, dealing with customers, solving operational problems, and producing results should not automatically lose an opportunity because another candidate has three letters after their name.

Education should absolutely be considered just like their experience.

It simply shouldn't always be the gatekeeper.

AI is eliminating many people based on minimum requirements and weeding out strong candidates, just to help companies check their requirement boxes.

Marketing Has Changed Too

Marketing is another profession where experience can be extremely valuable.

Today's marketers need to understand consumers, content, analytics, social media, digital advertising, brand strategy, e-commerce, AI, customer acquisition, and rapidly changing technology.

Someone who has spent ten years actually building campaigns, managing advertising budgets, studying customer behavior, developing brands, and measuring results may bring considerably more practical knowledge than someone with the "correct" degree but limited experience.

Again, hire for capability.

Not simply credentials.

Skills-Based Hiring Makes More Sense

Instead of beginning a job description with: Bachelor's degree required.

Start with a different question: What does this person actually need to know how to do?

Then hire around those requirements.

Look at:

· Relevant experience

· Demonstrated results

· Technical ability

· Leadership experience

· Communication skills

· Problem-solving ability

· Industry knowledge

· Customer relationships

· Work ethic

· Adaptability

· Willingness to learn

If a degree is truly necessary for the profession, require it.

Doctors, attorneys, engineers, in certain regulated positions, accountants in specific roles, and many other professions understandably require formal education and licensing.

But thousands of positions have degree requirements that exist primarily because that's how the job description has always been written.

That isn't a good enough reason anymore.

Stop Confusing Education With Intelligence

This may be the most important point.

Not having a four-year degree does not mean someone isn't intelligent.

And having a four-year degree does not automatically mean someone understands business or how to act around people.

People learn differently.

Some thrive in classrooms.

Others thrive by working with their hands.

Some learn through books.

Others learn by building companies, managing people, selling products, repairing equipment, creating marketing campaigns, or solving problems every day.

Neither path should automatically be considered superior.

They are simply different forms of education.

Open the Door

Companies constantly say they want innovative thinkers, strong leaders, entrepreneurial employees, experienced salespeople, and problem-solvers.

Then they create hiring filters that eliminate many of those exact people.

That needs to change.

Remove unnecessary degree requirements, and you may discover candidates who would never have made it through your applicant tracking system.

Interview with the experienced salesperson.

Talk to the technician who worked their way into management.

Consider the entrepreneur who spent 15 years building a company.

Meet the operations leader who started on the warehouse floor.

Give trade school graduates an opportunity.