The Why, What, and How of Skills-Based Talent Practices

More jobs than ever require a four-year college degree, including many that never did in the past. Beth Berwick is among those calling for a retreat. “You have to take that requirement off of job descriptions,” she said. “It’s excluding 64% of the population — including 76% of Black Americans and 80% of Latinos.” Instead, she maintains, organizations should be hiring based on the skills they need.

Berwick made her comments during Work/23, an MIT Sloan Management Review symposium held in May 2023. Berwick is a partner at Grads of Life, which helps companies build inclusive talent practices. It’s a subsidiary of Year Up, a Boston-based nonprofit that works to bring equitable access to economic opportunity to all young adults.

Degrees weren’t always the default proxy for competence. Research conducted by Grads for Life, Harvard Business School, and Accenture in 2017 has shone a light on degree inflation. “Roles that used to not require a four-year degree all of a sudden were requiring them,” Berwick said.

Building a skills-based approach to hiring and talent development goes hand in hand with building a more equitable organization, she explained. That means reworking job descriptions, implementing ongoing skills training to improve retention and build pathways to advancement, and continually encouraging new mindsets that value inclusivity. Companies that start down this path might be surprised by how far they can go: Many organizations, Berwick said, have removed the four-year degree requirement from the majority of their roles.

Berwick described Grads of Life’s work with the Cleveland Clinic to bring skills-first practices to recruiting and retaining long-overlooked Black community members. The health organization rewrote 260 job descriptions for over 2,000 roles and removed the four-year degree requirement from 90%. It went on to hire or promote 1,019 Black employees into jobs with family-sustaining wages. Berwick noted that the project was named a critical priority by senior leaders at Cleveland Clinic — “specifically by their CEO” — which created organizationwide buy-in.

Berwick wasn’t able to get to all of the questions from attendees during the Work/23 event, so she answers some of them below. (Questions and answers have been lightly edited for clarity.)

How are you advising companies to develop unbiased hiring assessments?

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