If you go down the list of job openings among 2019 LinkedIn Top Companies, it’s not exactly hard to find positions that don’t require a college degree.
Take an opening for a research manager at Facebook, or another for a live streaming engineer at Amazon. Neither of the job descriptions mention a degree (of any kind, in fact) among the basic requirements for the position. It’s a trend that’s reflective of a simple fact: Some of the most prestigious companies in the nation have indeed opened their doors to job applicants who haven’t graduated from four-year institutions.
“I’ve been able to excel beyond my own imagination,” says J. Bobby Dorlus, a senior site reliability engineer at Twitter.
See: The jobs at Top Companies you can land without a college degree
Dorlus, who holds an associate’s degree, is one of over a handful of people who spoke to LinkedIn about how they’ve thrived at top companies despite not having a four-year degree. With more job openings than job seekers in the U.S. right now, employers are increasingly looking beyond pedigrees to recruit people like them, people who have the skills to do the job effectively. That has tangible effects on the interview process, says Bill Castellano, a professor at Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations.
“Company recruiters that are loosening degree requirements, primarily for technical hires, are changing their recruiting tactics,” said Bill Castellano, a professor at Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations. “The selection process also relies more on testing the candidate’s required skills through technical interviews and various technical employment tests. Prior work experience is also heavily weighted for these candidates.”
Still, there still seems to be a consensus around the idea that the model for career success begins with a college degree. There’s good reason for this, too. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently show that college graduates not only earn significantly more than those with less educational experience, but also experience unemployment at lower rates as well.
And even among common positions at top companies that appear most likely to feature employees who don’t have four-year degrees, the rate of non-college grads in either of those positions goes no higher than 27 percent. But those who were able to breakthrough without a traditional education tell LinkedIn it was a matter of teaching themselves new skills on the jobs and having good timing.
During a career that has spanned over 20 years, Kristin Gorman has navigated her way through many high profile companies, including Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Cisco. Today, she works in technology sales as an account executive at Dell, ranked No. 10 among LinkedIn Top Companies in the U.S. But her career started out at a much smaller company, making $10 per hour after searching for an opening on the job site Dice. She did a combination of desktop support and admin work for a small IT recruiting firm where she got exposure to tons of applicant resumes. She then learned more about how to take advantage of the IT market overall for her career.
“I had enough skills from that job and from self-learning to be able to craft my resume well enough to get an interview for a support role at a Law School,” she said. “That was 1998. By the end of 1998, I had a job at Morgan Stanley doing desktop support.”
Others, like Nike Account Executive Andres Mori gained expertise at a small company before moving on to the retail giant. Mori took his associate’s degree in business from SUNY Columbia Greene Community College and went to work as a sales associate at a snowboard shop located on a ski resort in upstate New York. From there, he became a marketing intern, then shifted through multiple jobs internally, which helped him land a job at a major snowboarding brand.
“Three years at the resort, and three positions later, I was finally granted legal status,” says Mori, who also said he couldn’t attend a four-year institution because of his immigration status. “I then was offered a job working for Burton Snowboards… then head hunted to work for Nike, in their skateboarding and snowboarding division. Seven years later I worked my way up the corporate ladder!”
Other LinkedIn members pointed out that their careers were able to progress because they’d built up portfolios of work. J.D. Funari, a trailer editor at Netflix, says his career began in Albany, NY, during the early 2000s, when he taught himself how to edit video before landing a role at a local news station.
“I enrolled in a six-month TV production class after high school which was very news centric.” Funari said. “The first version of Final Cut Pro was released during that time and while I was given a primer at the class I did the majority of learning at home on my own system. My father loaned me the money to buy both the software and a Mac G4.”
Funari says he has never been asked about his education background during a job interview, and only once (when he was applying for a job as a TV promo editor in the mid 2000s) worried about a lack of formal education impeding his success. “After that job however I had built up enough of an editing reel that I was only being judged on my work, not my education.”
What the skills vs. schools trend could ultimately mean is an increase in pathways towards well paying jobs. After all, if certain positions are open to applicants beyond the minority of Americans who have four-year degrees, that signals more opportunity for a wider pool of talent.
Still, mere access to well paying careers isn’t the only factor to consider before deciding whether to obtain a certain level of education, says Nicole Smith, a research professor and chief economist at Georgetown University. Mobility within that career should be considered as well.
“Long term, however, you might need to consider whether there’s a glass ceiling on your potential for earnings based on the fact that you don’t have a bachelor’s degree,” Smith says. “There’s still a hierarchy of wages, or earning potential, by education level.”
