Are uni degrees really that important any more?
I spent a lot of my working life to look at the curriculum. When I helped to build a growing average company for 15 years, we did not have a department for human resources for many of them. This meant that every time we published a work advertisement, hundreds of CVS would flooded my mailbox.
After scanning each curriculum one by one, I soon developed a strategy to process them. First of all, I would seek the current role of the candidate, measuring their skills and responsibilities to see if they aligned with what we needed.
There are many professions in which a university diploma will always be a necessity, but they are becoming less essential in Hirers’ eyes.Credit: action
I would have noticed how long they had worked there (anything less than 18 months was usually an orange flag) and therefore compare the previous roles and the progression of the career to see if their skills have improved over time.
The last thing I noticed, if I looked at everything, were the qualifications of formal education. For me, the course that someone had studied at university, or if they had been even, was the least important thing for them. The work experience they had was all that really mattered.
Like Hirer, I’m not alone. The need for university qualifications in the workplace is increasingly questioned. A recent Hay 2025 Skills Reportwho interviewed over 5,000 hiring managers in Australia and New Zealand, discovered that 86 % was looking for assumption methods based on skills to find the right candidates.
A separate Workday ratio last month showed similar results, with 93 % of leaders who claimed to be at ease to take people based on their skills profiles.
A big piece of young people is bet that the Hecs debt will be worth it when they start looking for full -time jobs.
The world is changing quickly and universities are struggling to keep up. Entire industries are quickly evolving around us, being rewritten in real time from the progress in artificial intelligence that are erasing the career paths and creating new ones in their wake.
Universities are vaguely trying to keep up with the rhythm, but when the design of the lesson and the materials of the course take years to evolve, the reality is that some subjects are simply becoming obsolete at each semester of passage.
