<\/span><\/h2>\nIs skills-based hiring real in 2026?<\/strong>
\nIn parts of the market. More than half of US states have committed to it for public jobs, and state job ads have measurably changed. Federal law now requires skills assessments by late 2027. In most private hiring, the change in actual hires has been small.<\/p>\nWhich employers are most likely to hire without a degree?<\/strong>
\nState governments in committed states, federal agencies moving to technical assessments, and private employers in occupations where BLS already lists sub-degree entry, such as insurance and real estate sales, claims, property management and supervisory roles.<\/p>\nWhich states removed degree requirements first?<\/strong>
\nMaryland in March 2022, followed in 2022 by Colorado and Tennessee; Utah passed a related law in 2021. By November 2024, 25 states had acted, according to NBER Working Paper 33220.<\/p>\nWhat does the Chance to Compete Act change for federal job seekers?<\/strong>
\nIt requires agencies to examine applicants with position-specific technical assessments based on a job analysis, not mainly on self-assessment questionnaires, from three years after enactment in December 2024. It also requires OPM to review whether minimum education requirements are justified.<\/p>\nDoes AI make degree requirements more or less likely?<\/strong>
\nBoth forces exist. AI skills are still requested mostly in degree-level postings, but public employers post a larger share of AI jobs at sub-degree level, and about a quarter of AI postings list no education requirement. AI screening tools may replace the degree filter with a less visible one.<\/p>\n<\/span>Sources<\/span><\/h2>\n\n- Heck J, Corcoran de Castillo B, Blair PQ, Debroy P. Tearing the Paper Ceiling: The Impact of State Commitments to Remove Degree Requirements on Public Awareness and Job Opportunities for STARs. NBER Working Paper 33220, December 2024. Not peer reviewed; three authors are affiliated with Opportunity@Work.<\/li>\n
- U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Chance to Compete Act of 2024 Consolidated Report to Congress (Public Law 118-188). December 2025.<\/li>\n
- Public Law 118-188, Chance to Compete Act of 2024, 138 Stat. 2644. Approved 23 December 2024. U.S. Government Publishing Office.<\/li>\n
- Executive Order 13932 of June 26, 2020, Modernizing and Reforming the Assessment and Hiring of Federal Job Candidates. Federal Register 85(127), 1 July 2020.<\/li>\n
- Institute for Responsive Government. Cutting Red Tape for States to Hire Top Talent: A Landscape Overview. 26 June 2025. Nonprofit; state figures cite the National Governors Association.<\/li>\n
- National Governors Association and Lightcast. Empowering Progress: Harnessing Skills-Based Strategies to Drive Public Sector Excellence. February 2025. Summary page.<\/li>\n
- Georgia Department of Administrative Services, Human Resources Administration. Reevaluate College Degree Requirements to Expand Job Opportunities and Address Recruitment Challenges (Senate Bill 3 report). November 2024.<\/li>\n
- Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School Project on Managing the Future of Work. The Emerging Degree Reset. February 2022.<\/li>\n
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment Projections 2025-35, AI exposure categories table, and AI exposure categories methodology page. 2026.<\/li>\n
- Galeano S, Hodge N, Ruder A. By Degree(s): Measuring Employer Demand for AI Skills by Educational Requirements. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Workforce Currents, May 2025.<\/li>\n
- Indeed Hiring Lab UK and Ireland. A Degree of Skill: Why UK Job Postings Don’t Often Mention a Formal Education Requirement. 29 August 2024. Company research.<\/li>\n
- Lara S. Skills-Based Hiring: Increasing Access to Opportunity. LinkedIn Economic Graph Research Institute, 3 March 2025. Company research.<\/li>\n
- Opportunity@Work. Skilled Workers Are Finally Gaining Ground. AI Will Decide Whether They Keep It (State of the Paper Ceiling 2026 release). 23 June 2026. Advocacy organisation.<\/li>\n
- Opportunity@Work. Opportunity@Work Releases Policy Playbook for Skills-Based Hiring Ahead of Midterm Election Season. 16 September 2026. Advocacy organisation.<\/li>\n
- Opportunity@Work. Opportunity@Work and Brookings Launch AI Readiness Lab. 2026 press release. Advocacy organisation.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
The federal and state data tables report figures as printed in their sources, with point changes recomputed by CEOtudent. The two occupation tables joining Burning Glass Institute and NBER posting data to BLS Employment Projections, the 3.5 percent all-occupation growth figure, the five-door framework and the 6-question degree-line test are CEOtudent analyses. Not used: the widely quoted “70 million STARs” and “75 million STARs” figures as precise counts, because Opportunity@Work’s own 2026 releases use both; a LinkedIn “19 times” US talent-pool figure from its 2023 report, which we could not open and which LinkedIn says should not be compared with its 2025 estimates; and Delaware and California counts that appeared only in news coverage.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nThis content was compiled with the support of AI following in-depth research, then written and prepared for publication by the CEOtudent editorial team.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Skills-based hiring is real in some places and thin in most. Governments moved first: 25 states had committed to dropping unnecessary degree requirements by November 2024, and in Virginia the share of state postings with no degree requirement rose from 58 percent in 2019 to 90 percent in 2024. Federal law now requires job-specific skills tests, yet in fiscal 2025, 91.23 percent of federal open-competition announcements still relied only on self-rating questionnaires. This guide maps where the degree screen actually fell, by employer and by occupation, and turns it into a career-move test.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":326397,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4599,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gelisim","category-is"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ceotudent.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}