As ‘Skills-Based Hiring’ Becomes All The Rage, These Education Leaders Want To Overturn A 117-Year-Old Way Of Measuring Students’ Experiences

Companies have long evaluated new employees by college degrees and their years of experience in a field. In school, learning has long been measured by “credit hour”—the time spent in a classroom—since 1906.

But as companies like Google, IBM and Accenture drop degree requirements and put more emphasis on skills when hiring, leaders from established education organizations want to overturn that approach.

Last week, the very think tank that invented the traditional credit-hour measurement—the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching—announced it was teaming up with Educational Testing Service, the nonprofit standardized testing developer, to begin changing how schools measure learning and skill development. Currently in the research process and focused on gaining stakeholders, the nonprofits said schools could eventually assess students using methods like project feedback and artificial intelligence tools—rather than standardized testing and seat time.

In today’s labor market, “the challenge is that there hasn’t been a new definition of this currency of skills,” says Amit Sevak, CEO of nonprofit ETS. “As the world of work is changing and people are starting to realize competencies are really more of the driver of outcomes, there’s been a discussion around how to do this.”

Sevak, along with Carnegie Foundation President Timothy Knowles, says it starts with schools. The two organizations announced the partnership on April 17 at the annual ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego, saying that instead of traditional measurements like GPA, attendance, test scores and credit hours, schools should measure students’ skills via projects, feedback from teachers or artificial intelligence tools. Other education and workforce development leaders at the annual summit touted the education system’s role in workplace readiness.

“Current assessment regimes provide a very narrow picture of what those skills, assets and experiences are,” Knowles says. Today’s education system is like “entering a time machine” when you walk into school, says Hadi Partovi, founder of Code.org, an education nonprofit focused on getting schools to teach computer science and other relevant skills.

He says education is at a crossroads. “The school system, K-16 system, is letting a lot of people down. It’s preparing a lot of graduates, but those graduates increasingly don’t have the skills the workplace really needs.”

To cope, companies are looking to upskill their employees whether through new hires or workforce development programs.

Julia Stiglitz, cofounder and CEO of upskilling platform CoRise, says a common challenge for workers is communicating the skills they have to employers and hiring managers. CoRise courses have users complete projects that require specific technical skills such as building a search engine using Best Buy data or an image generator using Stable Diffusion.

Talking about projects and work that job seekers have actually done helps them explain what they mean by a certain skill and help “bring it to life,” she says. Meanwhile, “students are so much more motivated when they’re working on something fun and exciting—and relevant” to the workplace, Stiglitz says.

Project-based assessments are what ETS and the Carnegie Foundation are envisioning to prepare and measure students’ skills. The potential changes in measuring education experience come as the chatter about shifting to a “skills-based” approach to jobs and hiring has exploded over the past few years. Not only are companies dropping college degree requirements from job postings; they are using artificial intelligence tools to scan their workforces or candidate pools for people who have specific skills, such as graphic design or coding, rather than degrees from certain schools or prior experience at specific firms. Meanwhile, job seekers are placing more emphasis on communicating specific skills they have, listing specific certifications or adding skills like web creation or photography to their LinkedIn profiles.

In the past year, LinkedIn reports, users added 380 million individual skills such as public speaking or software development to their profiles, up over 40% since last year according to a recent analysis. On LinkedIn’s employer accounts, about one in five job postings in the U.S., or 19%, no longer list college degrees as a requirement, up from 15% in 2021, according to the report.

The skills-based approach to hiring can also be an equity lever. “By leveraging this skill-based approach, there are opportunities to increase access for low income, first generation and underrepresented young people,” Knowles says. LinkedIn’s analysis showed that a skills-first approach to hiring can add up to 20 times more eligible workers to employer talent pools.

Looking ahead, ETS and the Carnegie Foundation are focused on doing more research, finding the right products to measure students’ skills and shifting related policies to get stakeholders like college and university officials, other education leaders and civil rights organizations on board.

“We’ve known for maybe 50 or 80 years that there are a set of skills that are important to the world of work,” Knowles said. “And we’re now at the point, because of advancements in data science and technology, where we can reliably measure those skills.”