Reasons to hire someone without degree

According to Liz Ryan, here are ten good reasons to hire someone without a four-year degree into a staff professional job:

1. Some people learn best in school, and other people don't. They learn by doing. You will miss out on a huge talent population if you screen out brilliant, capable and hard-working people for whom the classroom is not a good learning environment -- but for whom your plant or office would be.

2. Some people worked through the years other folks were in college. They learned on the job. In contrast, some new graduates from four-year institutions have never worked at all. They have never held a job. Which candidate is going to make a bigger contribution to your organization, sooner?

3. Some folks could not afford college when they were of traditional college age. They might do brilliantly in college later in their lives, but right now they don't have any formal education past high school. Unless your company requires a new hire's four-year degree to map perfectly to his or her job function, why would you care very much whether your sharp new employee has spent the past four years in school -- or working, and learning as they go?

4. Some hiring managers believe that a four-year degree is the mark of a mature adult versus a rowdy kid. That is ridiculous. Some kids are studious and some are not. Many kids make it through a four-year degree program without maturing in any way. It's all about the kid -- not their degree or lack thereof.

5. Community college instructors are real-world practitioners who can teach their students not only their subject but also the mechanics of their trade and how to make a career in it. They teach those things alongside the "how tos" of the profession. They teach from real-world examples. However, many community colleges don't offer four-year degrees. Why penalize a student for training under a working professional versus a university professor? If anything, we would expect businesses to prefer the former to the latter.

6. Some folks graduate from high school and join the military, or volunteer to serve their communities. It is likely to take longer for these students to earn a degree because of their military service or volunteering commitment. Their service is critical and beneficial to a healthy society, so why make it harder for military veterans and former volunteers to get hired into responsible positions the minute their service commitment is complete?

7. When you open your hiring pipeline to people with more varied backgrounds you will increase the diversity of your new hires -- bringing in new points of view, new ideas and talent from a wider spectrum than you will ever get hiring strictly graduates of four-year degree programs.

8. When you hire a mix of four-year college graduates and people without college degrees, everybody will learn something new. Your department managers may learn the most!

9. When you drop the iron-clad four-year-degree requirement from your hiring protocol, you will become the employer of choice in your area for smart, accomplished folks without college degrees -- people you probably should have hired ages ago and who can help your business tomorrow.

10. Whenever you re-evaluate and question your standard ways of doing things, you grow as a person and a professional, and your fellow leaders grow as well.
Spending four years on campus doesn't make you smarter. It doesn't make you more creative. It teaches you certain things that may or may not be applicable in your new job.

Lazy shortcuts like "We only consider candidates with four-year degrees" are a vestige of the outdated Machine Age, and need to disappear sooner rather than later.




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