Yahoo Finance had an interesting story about employers starting to drop college degree requirements as many jobs go unfilled.
The researchers analyzed more than 51 million job listings, looking for four-year college degree requirements. In 2017, 51% required the degree. By 2021, that share had declined to 44%.
Finance Yahoo
When labor is plentiful, employers can be selective and impose endless requirements on candidates but when the situation is flipped, it’s candidates that are in the driver seat and can be highly selective at which employers they will bother to show up for interviews.
The good news for candidates is that they can expect to be in the driver’s seat for the next decade as 10,000 boomers retire each day and take with them their decades of knowledge, experiences, skills, and tenure.
The bad news is that businesses will struggle. The smaller the business the bigger the struggle as we explained in What’s Happening With Hourly Wages? T-Rex Will Eat First, where we told you that large companies like Amazon and Walmart consume all the labor they can first and leave the left overs for medium and smaller sized companies. These large companies also set the wages in the area as they are the employers with the deepest pockets usually.
Even more bad news for businesses is that many employees are voting to unionize which will empower employees to extract even higher wages and benefits over the next few years. The dropping of college degrees is the natural evolution of a tight labor market and it is possible to extrapolate what might come next: Disregarding criminal convictions, drug use, and overlooking legal worker status.
Of course, if you’re doing your homework, you know there is plenty of profit to be made in these new dynamics by focusing on the companies that will reap benefits moving forward. Stay tuned and stay solvent…