Big-box retail colossus Walmart is removing college degrees as requirements for hundreds of corporate jobs in what is described as an effort to remove “unnecessary barriers” to career advancement.
The company announced that it would be updating job descriptions for positions at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas so that higher education will no longer be a necessity, a move that comes at a time of decline in the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities which have been captured by the ideological “woke” left.
“While degrees should be part of the equation and in some cases even required, there are many roles where a degree is simply unnecessary, including at corporate headquarters,” Walmart said in a blog post about the new relaxed standards.
(Video: YouTube/Fox 26 Houston)
Walmart’s move comes as other major companies are also cutting back on the number of positions for which college degrees are required, a growing business trend as “skills-based hiring” gains popularity in corporate boardrooms as times change and big business adapts to a more challenging hiring environment.
According to the business news outlet Forbes, Lorraine Stomski, the company’s senior vice president for associate learning and leadership said that historically, Walmart has been “like every other organization. We would create a job description based on what credentials were needed, which was a combination of some skills [with] a heavy emphasis on the credential needed,” like a “diploma or other designation.”
Stromski told Forbes that in the company’s free online college benefit, she’s “seen a shift” in Walmart employees who are working on “majority college credentials to now more short-form stackable certificates for high-demand roles.”
“We’ve used degrees as proxies for skills that have, frankly, been weak proxies,” Julie Gehrki, vice president of philanthropy for Walmart.org told Forbes. “Moving to a skills-based system is saying we actually need to be more granular than this. We need to recognize the specific pieces of skills people have. They need to be validated in some way.”
“The fact that a company like Walmart is taking these steps really underscores the fact that this is a movement that has significant traction,” said Maria Flynn who is the president of Boston-based nonprofit Jobs for the Future.
According to Forbes, “Companies such as IBM, Accenture and Google have all worked to reduce the number of jobs that require degrees—and many more are taking steps to do the same. According to a 2022 report by Burning Glass Institute, a labor market research nonprofit, some 46% of middle-skill occupations and 31% of high-skill occupations saw a “material” reduction in degree requirements between 2017 and 2019.”
“We’re rewriting job descriptions for our campus (headquarters) jobs to factor in the skills people possess, alongside any degrees they hold,” the blog post written by Gehrki and Stomski reads, according to Fox Business. “This creates an either/or option for an applicant: to be considered for the job, you can have a related college degree or possess the skills needed for the job, whether through previous experience or other forms of learning.”
“Both options count,” the execs said. “While degrees should be part of the equation and in some cases even required, there are many roles where a degree is simply unnecessary, including at corporate headquarters.”
The vast majority of the company’s jobs at its retail superstores and grocery markets also do not require college degrees.
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