Employers Including Blackstone, Walmart, And Microsoft, Increasing Focus On Skills Over College Degrees

With rising costs, student protests and looming budget cuts, sentiment on the power of a college degree continues to sour. Now, top employers, while not abandoning the need for top college grads, are leaning into specific skills instead of degrees to find the right talent.

The Skills-First Workforce Initiative, led by Philadelphia-based nonprofit Burning Glass Institute with $500,000 in backing from Walmart, is launching a career website outlining the skills needed for some of the most in-demand jobs in the market. The SkillsFirst website details skills needed for nine job titles –retail salesperson; first-line supervisors of retail sales workers; sales managers; customer service representatives; customer service managers; financial analysts; product managers; and software developers. These roles account for over 11 million workers, according to Burning Glass.

Joining the non-profit in this new initiative are ten of America’s largest employers, including Accenture, Bank of America, Blackstone, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Nordstrom, PepsiCo, Walmart and Verizon in the launch.

“Just being able to understand and define the skills required for a job, it sounds simple but it’s actually a really big exercise,” says Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute.

Skills-based hiring has grown in popularity in the last year, especially as diversity, equity and inclusion programs have come under attack. In September, the Department of Labor released a starter kit for employers looking to change their degree requirements. Advice included a sample rubric for “people skills,” a list of on-the-job scenarios and interview questions. But since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, the department has overhauled its offerings. A link to the recently published toolkit has been deleted and leads to an error page, though it is still available through the WayBack Machine.

Now the private sector is stepping in. Though discussions among Walmart, Burning Glass and the other employers have been ongoing for over a year, the launch of the website marks the first public release of specific language both employers and employees can rely on to describe job skills.

“This is noncompetitive in nature,” says Donna Morris, chief people officer at Walmart. “Each of these companies have their own hiring objectives, their own behavioral expectations that layer together with skills.” Two candidates with the same skills may be better fits for different companies. The companies in the coalition are also not direct competitors, covering a range of industries from finance to retail and pharmaceuticals.

The website lists four different groups of skills––baseline, leadership, role-specific skills and specialization––required for each position, assigning a percentage of importance and proficiency level for each skill.

Take the breakdown for a product manager. Baseline skills include knowing the “4 Ps” of marketing (product, price, place and promotion) and experience leading complex sales negotiations. But the most important, and in-demand, skills come in the role-specific competencies like using market research to accurately predict the lifecycle of a product. Each is assigned a level of mastery and how important, on average, the skill is to employers. Burning Glass says this is determined by their proprietary model, which pulls data from a database of tens of millions of job postings, analyzes how each job is described and pulls out common skills, and input from the 11 employers in the coalition.

The site also offers information on job-specific specializations, like computer science or user experience (UX). A software engineer for example needs to be able to write, troubleshoot and debug code while documenting changes in Git. But perhaps the most helpful information for job seekers is a skill’s wage premium, which reflects how much employers are willing to pay a premium for. For example, companies are willing to pay a 5% wage premium to product managers with UX experience, a 3.9% wage increase to software engineers who know Python and an 8.3% bump to those working in open-source platforms like Kubernetes.

Such specific language can be specially useful for non-traditional hires like veterans, who struggle to translate their experience in the armed forces to corporate America. It’s how employers can not only hire the right people, but deepen their talent pool, according to Sheri Bronstein, chief people officer at Bank of America

The launch of the website comes at a complex time in the labor market. The U.S. economy added about 228,000 jobs in March, more than forecasted, but unemployment increased slightly in the same month and DOGE-led cuts in the federal government will have ripple effects throughout private sectors. Add in fears of a looming recession and incoming tariffs on nearly all imports, and many businesses have paused their hiring and are reconsidering their 2025 plans. It’s left employees increasingly feeling stuck, unmotivated and unproductive.

“There’s a lot of reasons why the workforce may be disillusioned right now,” says Walmart’s Morris. “But as employers we can provide some hope and focus on investing in our people to optimize their success.”

A standard skills language becomes a way for employers to educate, motivate and be transparent with their workforces about what it takes to continue to grow. The unified skills language makes working on a desired promotion that much easier. The path from customer service representative to manager, for example, includes gaining leadership skills, coaching experience and account management experience.

But the power comes in being able to use that language defining skills and transferring it from one employer to the next. A unified language for “skills become a currency that [employees] can use to apply for that new job internally or externally,” says Morris.

Employers joining the initiative have already seen an impact on their own hiring practices and employee satisfaction.

Verizon, which says 99% of their roles do not require degrees, streamlined its repository of 70,000 job titles down to 2,100 different roles when first implementing its skills-first approach in 2021. The company boasts an average tenure of 13.1 years, 70% more than the national average of 3.9 years, which it credits to its career growth opportunities.

Skills-first gave Verizon employees the transparency needed to see the path towards a promotion across different roles, says its chief human resources officer Samantha Hammock. “When you start thinking about where your skills match into other roles, it opens a window of visibility into a whole new world of [job opportunities],” she adds.

It’s a similar case at Walmart, which prides itself over the fact that 75% of its store managers, who have a base pay of $130,000 can occasionally earn more than $500,000 a year, started in hourly positions. Skills training has raised customer and store cleanliness satisfaction scores in the top third of stores participating in training, and front-line workers are now promoted to a new role within an average of seven months.

Demarcating declining or in-demand skills is another benefit for early-career folks using the website, especially those deciding what job to take up in a quickly evolving labor market.

“Talent scarcity across the economy is requiring companies to rethink and rewire their hiring practices,” says Courtney della Cava, global head of portfolio talent and organization performance at Blackstone, which will be implementing skills-first approaches across its over 250 portfolio companies. Such practices are not just a way to increase retention, but also anticipate future skills needs.

It’s already happening. Take “AI prompt engineering”, where coders train AI large language models in answering questions, a skill required for software engineers that has become a top priority in 2024, according to Burning Glass. It was in virtually all descriptions for software engineers, but when Open AI and its competitors updated their chatbots to get better at answering prompts that were sometimes vague, the skill disappeared, reveals Erik Leiden, managing director of workforce strategy at Burning Glass. They had to ultimately remove the skill from the job page.

“There are skills that are growing in popularity now that will decline, and there are skills that will hit the radar that aren’t on the radar now,” he adds. The nonprofit says it will continuously update the skills needed for each job, using AI to keep track of requirement changes in job postings across its database.

Burning Glass is also already planning to expand the library of jobs and accompanying skillsets in the coming months. In its second phase, the website will host career pathways for 30 job titles, including wholesale sales representatives, security guards, shipping and inventory clerks and even human resources specialists.

Ultimately it’s all about unifying skills that employees already had, and employers sought out, but may have been describing in different ways. “Why should their skills not be the currency for growth they have ahead?” asks Morris.

Updates initiative funding from Walmart in second paragraph.