Thinking About Working: Issue #8
Written by Noah Leavitt, Director of the Career and Community Engagement Center
The Skills Edition
The most attention-getting job market-related discussion during the past month has been the increasing emphasis employers are placing on skills. In addition, and relatedly, many commentators have started noting how an emphasis on candidates’ skills may be becoming ascendant over other types of credentials or expertise.
To begin, a recent report from the Burning Glass Institute found that four high demand skills are spreading “from Silicon Valley to Main Street” so fast that the authors argued they are becoming “foundational.”
A columnist in Forbes questioned the sweeping argument Burning Glass was making about skills replacing intuitional credentials but concluded “employers’ more granular focus on the skills required in a changing workplace reflects momentous underlying innovations and is most likely to continue—education institutions had better take notice.”
More expansively, the learning platform provider Pearson recently crunched more than 21 million job postings from the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Pearson’s Skills Outlook identifies what they call “power skills”—the habits “powering the world’s work economy and individual careers.” Five skills in particular rose to the top. (Want to know what they are?)
The extraordinarily tight national labor market this season is nudging employers to expand the ways that they review applicants, including through a rising-in-popularity process called skills-based hiring. Author and entrepreneur Asha Aravindakshan recently told our colleagues at the National Association for Colleges and Employers that skills-based hiring “is a change to the prerequisite criteria of the role—such as removing degree requirements or years of experience from a job description—to encourage nontraditional candidates to apply to the opening.“
Earlier this fall, consulting giant McKinsey & Company issued a white paper pressing the case that hiring for skills will expand employers’ potential talent pool as excellent candidates may have the skills even if they don’t have certain degrees or other more traditional markers of professional accomplishment. Of particular interest to me was the section describing how to develop a new kind of interview process to “focus on vetting candidates based on skills rather than more subjective (and biased) measures such as ‘cultural fit,’” which the authors note can reduce the potential bias or prejudice from the interviewer.
Moreover, in a much discussed recent Harvard Business Review interview, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky talked at length about what he sees as a broad transition to employers focusing on skills. His passion for communicating this hiring evolution was so compelling that a follow-up story in Fortune found it shocking that the head of a massive social media networking platform concluded that “employers should focus on skills when making hiring decisions and deemphasize degrees and connections…” (emphasis added).
The Center for American Progress (CAP), a forward-thinking, creative, and prestigious think tank in Washington DC, issued a report advocating for the benefits of skills-based hiring for the state and local government workforce. Emerging from COVID-era slow down, CAP argues that focusing on candidates’ skills can “expand and diversify their workforces and meet their own talent needs.” As a point of Whitman pride, Allie Cohen ’22, did such an excellent job communicating her skills to the hiring team at CAP last Spring that they are now working there as an assistant editor!
Whitman students are doubly fortunate going into their internship and job searches. First, a Whitman degree is a powerful asset on its own, signaling an intense broad educational experience that is relevant to myriad professional realms.
Second, Whitties have skills! Thankfully, all Whitman students have countless opportunities to learn, practice, and master many skills that are in high demand by employers. Whitties succeed in their internship and job searches when they highlight these skills in their application and interview processes in a way that allows their future employer to see them using those skills in the workplace. Think about how to translate your experiences—in class, at a job or internship, or through a research project—into skills.
Last week I had a fantastic advising session with a student applying for an internship at a cutting edge and prestigious employer. During our practice interview the student did a very skillful (couldn’t resist that!) job “converting” many of their Whitman activities into the specific skills required for the position. This student is going to be successful in their internship search, whether they wind up at this or a different employer, because they understand and can act on the fundamental strategy of translating experience to skills that an employer is curious about.
Like any other skill, this one can be focused on and enhanced. Students can learn this on their own and practice with a friend, classmate or one of my amazing colleagues in the CCEC.
Students, when you have a little down time over break, I invite you to write down the skills that you drew on in five or six of your activities and classes this semester. Think about how you would describe those activities by honing in on how you utilized those skills to accomplish a goal.
Have a lovely Winter Break and see you in January. If you have ideas for next semester’s Thinking About Working columns I’d love to hear them!