6

REIMAGINE THE DIPLOMA

In his book Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment, Harvard professor Todd Rose tells of a woman named Jennie McCormick. Born and raised in Wanganui, New Zealand, McCormick was never well suited to the traditional classroom. At fifteen she dropped out of school and took a job cleaning horse stables. Soon after she took and failed her high school equivalency exam. By the time she was twenty-one, she was a single mother with no formal educational credentials to her name and few employment prospects for the future.¹

Then one day, when McCormick was in her mid-twenties, a relative handed her a pair of binoculars and pointed to the night sky. It was the first time she had ever seen the Milky Way. Enthralled and enraptured, she spent the next eleven years teaching herself everything she could about astronomy. She built a domed observatory, Farm Cove, out of spare parts in her own backyard. Five years later she used it to discover a new planet that was three times the mass of Jupiter and 15,000 light years away.

Here is how Scott Gaudi of Ohio State University described her discovery on a National Science Foundation conference call on February 13, 2008:

So basically what we found is a scaled down analog of our solar system. We found a star with two planets that look a lot like our Jupiter and Saturn, so by analog here, what I mean is that mass ratios of these two planets and the ratio of their separations from their parent star are very similar to that of Jupiter and Saturn, and by scaled down, I mean that the host star of these two planets is smaller, less massive and dimmer and fainter than our sun, but the planets themselves are also less massive and closer to their parent star so it looks like a scale model of our solar system, a scaled down version of our solar system. So, it’s an unprecedented discovery and quite exciting because, as a community, the extra-solar planet community, we’ve not found any planetary systems that really look like solar system analogs before, and the reason why we found it now and why this discovery was possible is because of the technique we used, which is called microlensing, and microlensing is intrinsically sensitive to planets in the cold distant outer regions of planetary systems like the places where our Jupiter and Saturn live.2

Jennie McCormick did this without a high school or college degree.³ Some might say this is the exception, not the rule. Perhaps. But remember how much we love those dropouts who invent things in their garage? How much more untapped IQ is out there?

I love this story, in part because it speaks to the magic that can happen when people find their purpose. Professional success isn’t always linear or simple; our lives can change dramatically when we find jobs that align with what we care about. Since 2005, McCormick has become a household name among astronomers: she has co-discovered twenty planets, named an asteroid, and coauthored more than twenty papers in academic journals.⁴

I also love this story for a different reason. It encourages us to ask important questions about our education system, about the kinds of skills that we value, and about the metrics that we use (or should use) to measure them in our students.

Jennie McCormick’s incredible rise to professional success tells us as much about the power of serendipitous encounters and personal grit as it does about the strengths and limitations of our school systems. Among all the different skills and types of intelligence that we possess as individuals—spatial, linguistic, computational, interpersonal—our schools do a great job of measuring only a few.

In the era of automation, questions about which skills are being taught and bestowed with credentials in the classroom are top of mind for students, educators, companies, and anyone who’s invested in building and maintaining the pipeline from classroom to career. In the past the trajectory was simple. A student moved from middle to high school. If they wanted to pursue a professional career, they’d go to college, too. At the end of college, their degree would signal to potential employers that they were equipped for a job.

Today this is no longer true. As every industry begins to rely on technology and automation, jobs of all stripes are becoming more specialized, more digitized, and more susceptible to change. Traditional grades and degrees can no longer guarantee that workers have the right skill sets to thrive in particular roles. As a result employers are struggling to translate traditional academic pedigrees into real-world capabilities.

TO DEGREE OR NOT TO DEGREE?

Consider the recent phenomenon of so-called degree inflation. More and more often companies are requiring that job applicants have a four-year college degree for roles that typically have been occupied by high school graduates, such as office supervisor and executive assistant. According to a 2017 study from Harvard Business School, more than six million jobs are currently at risk of degree inflation.5

It’s not hard to pin down the principle behind the practice. These days a diploma or a résumé no longer guarantees that someone can succeed in a job that increasingly demands technological know-how. One response to this problem is to err on the side of overqualification by hiring candidates with four-year degrees for middle-skills roles.

This tendency to inflate hiring standards, however, has come at a huge cost to both workers and employers. With the price of a college education skyrocketing over the past few decades, it’s becoming increasingly hard to get a bachelor’s degree. And with middle-skills jobs going to college graduates, degree inflation has made it harder for Americans without a college education to find gainful employment.

Some employers report having to provide higher salaries to fill middle-skills jobs with college graduates, who, as a result of being underemployed, have higher turnover rates and lower engagement levels. Meanwhile entire pools of affordable talent—recent high school graduates, older workers, the long-term unemployed—are being kept from millions of promising opportunities. In November 2019, The New York Times reported that although the U.S. unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, nearly 7 percent of Americans were looking for full-time work or had given up. To remedy this, many need training in new skills.

We now know that the skills gap is a problem of mismatch. But if the phenomenon of degree inflation teaches us anything, it’s that this mismatch doesn’t exist just between the skills companies want and the skills people have. It also exists between the skills we have and those that our degrees say we have.

Author and investor Ryan Craig, who has written extensively about higher education and new pathways to employment, frames the problem this way: what if the skills gap that everyone’s worried about is, in fact, an awareness gap? The issue at hand might be not that employees lack the proper skills but that business leaders lack the proper means of identifying them.6 Over the course of our lifetimes, we can accumulate an impressive array of skills that would qualify us for an impressive array of jobs. Still, only a few of these skills appear on diplomas and the résumés that land on the desks of potential employers.

Put yourself in the shoes of a recent graduate. After four years of hard work, you finally walk across that stately graduation stage, friends and family cheering, to receive a BA in, say, anthropology. With diploma in hand, you reflect on all the skills that you’ve accumulated over the past few years, both in and out of the classroom. You’ve learned how to manage finances as treasurer of the Rugby Club, analyze large data sets for anthropological field projects, negotiate conflict with a difficult roommate, and make great macchiatos and small talk as a barista at the local coffee shop.

You know that, combined, these skills—interpersonal aptitude, financial know-how, data analytics—have prepared you for a host of solid, well-paying jobs. But when you apply for that first position out of college, only a fraction of those skills is actually represented on your résumé and diploma. When you get the rejection letter for the job, you realize that it wasn’t the content of your credentials that cost you the role but all the things those credentials left out.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the glass wall, employers are suffering from a kind of skills blindness: faced with overgeneralized diplomas and nebulous credentials, companies are struggling to ascertain which real-world skills they can expect from both their job applicants and their existing workforce. Some have partnered with tech companies to design targeted assessments. L’Oréal, for example, collaborated with General Assembly to deploy the DM1 test, the same digital marketing skills assessment that Guardian used to measure the competencies of our employees.7 Since then, L’Oréal has used DM1 to assess more than 5,000 employees and 4,000 candidates during its hiring process.⁸

General Assembly conducted a study on the DM1 assessment with telling results: after analyzing the test results of 10,000 business professionals, the company found that overall, previous marketing experience was a poor proxy for digital marketing skills. In other words, when digital industries evolve this quickly, even former work experience doesn’t necessarily predict professional success.⁹

Companies and recent graduates aren’t the only ones feeling the consequences of this skills-credentials disconnect. Across the country, workers in industries that are being quickly displaced by automation are struggling to transition into jobs in other sectors—less because of a lack of skills as for a lack of imagination about how their existing skills can be leveraged in new industries.

One organization, the eKentucky Advanced Manufacturing Institute, has centered its programming on adapting old skills to new jobs.¹⁰ After coal miners in eastern Kentucky were hit hard with wide-ranging and unexpected layoffs, the institute put together a sixteen-week re-skilling curriculum that trained these workers to operate advanced manufacturing machinery. The choice of occupation was deliberate. The program coordinators knew that the demands of advanced manufacturing dovetailed with the existing mechanical expertise of Appalachian miners, which meant that their transition into the new job sector would be relatively fast and frictionless.

If we can close the awareness gap in our hiring and re-skilling programs, we might see millions of workers pivot into new and unexpected roles. In 2017, The New York Times used the Labor Department’s O*Net database to conduct an extensive analysis of the kinds of aptitudes and activities that different jobs require.11 What they found was a curious overlap in the skills required by seemingly dissimilar jobs. Someone who works at a retail store, for example, might have interpersonal skills that make her an equally effective car salesperson, even if the two roles don’t immediately seem analogous. Surprisingly enough, the same goes for bartenders and child-care workers.

I found this study both eye opening and thought provoking. At the very least, it prompted me to consider how Guardian might better detect these overlaps in our job searches and use this information to improve the way we hire.

For a moment, let’s return to our hypothetical graduation ceremony and put ourselves in a world that makes use of a different kind of diploma. Now, instead of walking across the stage to receive a diploma, you’re given a degree in the form of a virtual, verified, and verifiable “passport” of skills that you can send securely to potential employers. Rather than trying to make sense of a broad-brushed certification or some carefully calligraphed Latin declaration, potential employers can see that you’ve mastered Python in CompSci 101, community relations as a barista, and financial literacy as the treasurer of the Rugby Club—and they can match your skills with the right job.

A number of organizations, many of them governmental, have already started putting into place their own versions of the skills passport. The European Union, for example, launched the European Skills Passport in 2012, which enables European citizens who are looking for jobs throughout the EU to upload into one online profile items such as their CV, language qualifications, and diplomas.12 Australia has developed a similar online platform for individuals who are looking for jobs in the restaurant industry,¹³ as has Ontario’s Ministry of Education for its own pool of students and aspiring workers.¹⁴

By laying out exactly what a credential means in terms of concrete capabilities, these skills passports eliminate the problem at the heart of degree inflation. They take much of the guesswork out of hiring. And by placing a premium on the skills themselves, rather than the degrees that might or might not guarantee such skills, they pull new and nontraditional pools of talent—such as high school graduates and older workers—back into the hiring fold.

If we want to prepare workers for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we can’t focus just on developing robust training programs for employees. We have to redesign diplomas and degrees to take stock of the skills workers already have. We have to create skills-based, transportable credentials that are attached to a person, not a piece of paper. And we have to reconceptualize how we hire, building a credentialing system that’s flexible and sturdy enough to accommodate not only the Fourth Industrial Revolution but the fifth and sixth, too.

MACRO PROBLEM, MICRO SOLUTIONS

Let’s return again to our imaginary student. Imagine that, three months after you graduate from college, you stumble on a dream job that lists as one of its requisites something you didn’t learn in school: proficiency in the principles of cybersecurity. Unperturbed, you sign up for a well-regarded online course, pay a small fee, and spend the next six months immersed in quizzes, interactive projects, and capstones on everything from risk management to the architecture of the cloud. You graduate with a degree—called a “microdegree”—in cybersecurity studies, your new credential is uploaded to your skills passport, and just like that, you have what you need to land that coveted job.

This imaginary scenario isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. Microdegrees are already here, and they’ve already begun to disrupt the traditional institutions of brick-and-mortar schools.

These days, microdegrees are going by a variety of names. The online learning platform Udacity has trademarked them as “Nanodegrees,” EdX dubs them “MicroMasters,” and companies such as IBM (which recently started its own internal credentialing system) know them as “digital badges.” But whatever the nomenclature, companies and educators across the country are pinning big hopes on these bite-sized degrees and for good reason. Compared with the traditional college tack, microdegrees are substantially cheaper, more flexibly paced, easier to customize, and better aligned with professional needs.

Some firms are already making microdegrees a crucial part of their re-skilling programs. Remember AT&T’s ambitious Workforce2020 initiative, described in chapter 4? In order to keep their workers ahead of the evolving demands of an automated economy, the company invested $1 billion to design an ecosystem of online courses and microdegrees—part of the third layer of the program’s four-layer pyramid—that would enable employees to work toward new career pathways on their own time and at their own pace.

What resulted wasn’t merely a culture of continuous learning but a real-life internal model of the skills passport that gives workers a concrete foothold in a changing workplace and gives AT&T’s team leaders a more transparent way of matching skills-based credentials to skills-based needs. In one fell swoop, the company found a way to create a continuous learning environment, design an ecosystem of performance-based credentials, and help to close its skills gap—all with the micro-degree as a key building block.

Given the success of programs like these, the most pressing question facing business leaders is how to scale these initiatives nationwide. Colleges and universities might have one answer.

In recent years many colleges and universities have begun to adopt “stackable credentials”—a model of higher education that has the potential to transform how (and how easily) students can earn postsecondary credentials. Instead of asking students to hand over two to four years of their lives, higher-education institutions are breaking down postsecondary programs into a series of certifications that progressively “stack” into an industry accreditation or full-fledged degree. Similar to microdegrees, they’re skills based and bite sized: students can take them one year or one course at a time and accrue benefits incrementally while working their way toward a higher degree.

South Seattle College is one school that’s embracing this innovative model. The community college currently offers twelve BA degrees in a variety of areas, including hospitality management and sustainable building science technology, almost all of which are designed to result in stackable credentials. In order to accommodate workers of all stripes and schedules, the college also offers short-term skilling courses, online classes, on-the-job apprenticeships, and professional development curricula, many of which can be combined into various industry-relevant certifications.15

Far from experimenting for experimentation’s sake, South Seattle College is adapting to the needs of its diverse students, many of whom are more likely to thrive in an environment where learning is accessible and coursework manageable. In a 2016 interview, Holly Moore, the executive dean of the college’s Georgetown campus, put it this way: “I think that stackable credentials build on the way that mature older adults learn. It makes it viable for them to take on this big horrendous thing of a baccalaureate degree by biting off chunks and benefiting consistently as they progress.”16

It isn’t just older or nontraditional workers who are making use of stackable credentials, either. No longer tethered to standardized lecture or exam schedules, students at Salt Lake Community College can choose which industry-designed credentials to pursue, complete them at their own pace, and mix and match their certifications into a job-ready portfolio of skills.¹⁷

In 2016, Jacob Doetsch was in his second semester, working toward an associate degree in computer science information systems. After only one term at the school, he’d already earned two industry-designed certifications through his coursework—in networking and database systems management—and was on track to earn two more by the end of his second semester.

Doetsch is living proof of Craig’s hypothesis. Short-term, skills-based, stackable credentials don’t just offer flexibility to students at various points in their careers. They also help to close the awareness gap by clearly communicating to employers exactly which skills and competencies students have acquired, degree or no.

In a 2016 interview with Deseret News, Doetsch expressed a level of self-awareness that any company would be lucky to have: “Having a degree just proves that you finished two years of school. It doesn’t really demonstrate what you learned in school or if you’re ready to apply it in a job. But if you prepare for certification exams through school, it doesn’t just prove that I graduated with a two-year degree, but that I can actually do a specific job.”¹⁸

Companies including Intel and Microsoft are finding surprising partners to expand computer science learning for future generations. CSforALL is a national hub for the Computer Science for All movement. In late 2019, it joined with the Air Force Junior ROTC (JROTC) to announce an innovative new initiative that could dramatically increase the number of U.S. high school students taking an Advanced Placement (AP) computer science course, particularly among underrepresented populations such as minority and female students.19 More than 500,000 cadets at 3,400 high schools across the United States and abroad participate in JROTC programs administered by each of the military services. Only 32 percent of these cadets have access to AP computer science principles in their school, according to 2018–19 College Board data. The JROTC-CS initiative seeks to access this untapped human resource to address the national talent shortage in computing and cybersecurity and increase career opportunities for JROTC cadets, who are a highly diverse population—more than half are minority students and 40 percent are female. Additionally, JROTC is strongly represented in schools serving economically disadvantaged communities.

STANDARDIZING THE SKILLS PASSPORT

For an economy that’s outgrowing the static nature of the traditional diploma, microdegrees and stackable credentials are happy harbingers of change. In all the ways that matter, these certifications are strong where traditional academic pedigrees are not. They’re more affordable, personalized, usable, and attuned to the needs of a rapidly changing job market.

If the numbers tell us anything, it’s that students and aspiring workers are taking these benefits seriously. Between 2000 and 2012, the number of short-term vocational program credentials awarded by public, Title IV–eligible community colleges increased by 109 percent.20 Currently 41 million adults have nontraditional credentials.²¹

This rapid proliferation in short-term credentials is a good thing. At the very least, it’s emblematic of broader shifts in the way we design and deliver education in the age of automation. But it also raises an important concern about quality control. For a credentialing ecosystem to be functional, every company needs to know which skill sets are represented by which certifications. We have to build in safeguards against credential forgery and fraud. And we have to standardize the many different credentials and certifications that currently exist into a workable interface for employers, students, and aspiring workers.

Right now at least 334,000 distinct credentials are available for job seekers to obtain and companies to keep track of. That’s great for customizability but a daunting challenge when it comes to standardization.²² If a hiring manager is looking for a software developer, they might find a candidate who has an MTA in software development fundamentals, an AAS in blockchain development, and a PSP certification from Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute. Without an online guide to help employers decipher these credentials, the candidate might as well have thrown a fistful of alphabet soup on their résumé.

This is an intimidating problem, but it’s not insurmountable. In 2016, the Business Roundtable partnered with the Lumina Foundation to launch a nonprofit called Credential Engine,²³ the aim of which is to create a common language for understanding all the different credentials that exist—both in the United States and abroad—and compile them into a searchable database that can be accessed by anyone who needs it. Students can use the database to compare credentials side by side, and corporations can use it to shed light on what specific certifications entail.

Since 2016, Credential Engine has forged crucial partnerships with state governments and regulatory agencies in order to come up with shared standards of quality control. Armed with results-driven research and federal accreditation standards, the nonprofit and its governmental partners have sifted through hundreds of certification programs and highlighted only those that have been demonstrably effective—a win for the private and public sector alike.

If our companies want to capitalize on the promises of microdegrees and stackable credentials—and, more generally, a credentialing ecosystem that can prepare our workers for an automated economy—then we have to work creatively and collaboratively to standardize the fragmented landscape of programs that currently exists. This means being proactive about signing on to initiatives such as Credential Engine, supporting programs that have proven results, and convening cross-sector conversations with leaders in education, government, and the communities they serve about the efficacy of different platforms.

It’s going to take a lot of brainpower to make sure our balkanized credentialing ecosystem is up to the demands of an automated workplace. But emerging technologies are also promising to make the job at least a little bit easier. Blockchain technology, the distributed ledger behind cryptocurrencies and audit and regulatory compliance, is being eyed by educators and technologists for its potential to transform the diploma from a static paper record into a digital tool as practical and adaptive as today’s workforce.

In the summer of 2017, at a standard graduation ceremony hosted on the green of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 111 students walked across the stage and became the first graduates ever to have been given the option to receive their diplomas on their smartphones. The pilot program was part of a joint project between the MIT Media Lab and a software development company called Learning Machine, and it was the first of its kind to use blockchain to grant short-term program certifications and professional degrees.24

If they opted for the smartphone option, these graduates would gain access to a verifiable, tamper-proof electronic version of their diploma via an app called Blockcerts Wallet. At the tap of a button, they could then send the records securely to anyone they wanted—family, friends, admissions committees, or employers.

If the Blockcerts Wallet sounds a lot like the skills passport, that’s because it is—or, at least, it has the potential to be. While futurists mull over the causes and consequences of automation, educators are talking more and more about what technology can do for the classroom and, specifically, what blockchain can do for credentialing.

In principle, Blockcerts Wallet operates like a credit card. A trusted source deposits important information into it (for instance, health records or academic pedigrees), encrypts the data, and makes it easy and secure to share the data with others. Crucially, Blockcerts Wallet also has the ability to append additional information to any item within it—the skills gained in an internship, for example, or the coursework taken to earn a credential—and inject specificity into an otherwise nebulous diploma.

Across the country, microdegrees and stackable credentials are helping to create an educational environment that is more affordable, effective, and customizable than many of the degree programs that we take for granted today. And though the challenges of standardization will likely continue to plague the country’s credentialing ecosystem for at least several more years, the transformations that are already taking place in the landscape of higher education should leave us feeling hopeful.

After all, these innovations are making real the far-reaching potential of a new kind of credential, one that’s dynamic and attuned to our evolving repertoire of skills, rather than static and time bound. Thanks to burgeoning technologies such as blockchain, it’s not hard to imagine a day (one probably coming sooner than we think) when skills passports will be as trustworthy and transportable as our credit cards and when applying for a job will be as easy as tapping a button or swiping the screen.

MINDING CHANGE AND CHANGING MINDS

Less than five years after the Chugach School District in Alaska decided to redesign its flagging education system back in 1994, the region shot up from the bottom quartile on Alaska’s mandatory state assessments to the 72nd percentile on average. Suddenly the small town became a magnet for educators and government officials who wanted to know exactly what Chugach was doing right.

The answer, it turns out, is something called “competency-based education.” Today schools in Chugach look very different from the typical K–12 institution. Students aren’t sorted by age, teachers don’t hand out report cards with grades from A to F, and there is no one-size-fits-all curriculum. Instead, families and teachers in Chugach collaborate with one another to design individualized learning plans, small-group projects, and schoolwide initiatives. Teachers are no longer the “sage on the stage”; rather, they’re the “guide on the side.” And students take the learning at their own pace and demonstrate their mastery of certain skills through performance-based assessments.

Since 1994, Chugach has been a national exemplar of educational innovation.25 Schools in other parts of the country have followed its lead—New Hampshire is one notable example—and the performance-based educational model now underpins the self-paced, skills-based modules that make up microdegrees, stackable credentials, and other online learning platforms.

Educators and business leaders can learn a lot from Chugach. In recent years, the district has demonstrated the ways in which new models of learning are extending far beyond urban or corporate re-skilling programs, to public schools nationwide and even the secluded foothills of the southern coast of Alaska.

But the reforms of the Chugach School District are also a testament to something else: the importance of mindset. Long before any plans of action were drawn up, teachers, parents, administrators, students, and community members convened to discuss a fundamental question: what should learning look like?

As it happened, there was one person who kept coming up in these conversations, and that was Carol Dweck, the renowned psychologist I wrote about earlier. The ideal learning environment, the participants hypothesized, was one that would cultivate a “growth mindset” in its students—the belief that intelligence is a product of hard work and self-improvement rather than innate talent.

In order to accomplish this, Chugach needed a personalized educational model that catered to the learning styles and interests of its students, one in which students would feel compelled to take ownership of their own progress. And so, with feedback from parents and community members, the Chugach School District’s teachers designed one that was rooted in the principles of competency-based education.

The community’s interest in Dweck’s growth mindset turned out to be well founded. By making this mindset the guiding principle of their new educational model, Chugach was able to redesign its curricula from the ground up into a system that has since become the envy of educators everywhere.

This transformation wasn’t necessarily easy. In an interview published in 2016, Debbie Treece, Chugach’s director of special education, said, “We are heavily steeped in the growth mindset. I didn’t know how important it was in the beginning, but we are now at the point where staff understand that students must have a growth mindset to take on ownership and for continuous learning to occur.”26 It’s not enough to theorize about change on this scale; a mindset shift on the part of students requires a mindset shift on the part of educators. Or, in Debbie’s words: “It’s now institutionalized in our work.”²⁷

Dweck’s contributions to the field of psychology have dramatically changed how educators and policy makers everywhere think about student outcomes and academic success in the past decade. In 1964, Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal, armed with a stack of booklets, entered an elementary school classroom in San Francisco to conduct an experiment. With the permission of the teachers, Rosenthal administered to the class what he said was a special intelligence test from Harvard, the “Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition.” The test would predict which youngsters in the room were about to experience a dramatic increase in their IQ. After the test, Rosenthal said, he would give the teachers a list of which students were on the cusp of an intellectual growth spurt, according to their results.

In truth, the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition was just a standard IQ test dressed up with a different name, and Rosenthal never used the results. After the test he did indeed pull together a list of names and hand them off to the elementary school teachers—but he chose the names completely at random, with no reference to how those students had actually performed on the test.

Rosenthal spent the next two years closely tracking the IQ of each member of the class, and by the end of the trial, he’d stumbled upon a shocking result. In that period of twenty-four months, the students whom he’d randomly chosen for the “special” list had, in fact, experienced faster gains in IQ than their counterparts.

When Rosenthal looked more closely at his research, he realized that the expectations of the teachers had altered their interactions with these students in subtle, nearly undetectable ways. Students who were expected to succeed were given more individualized feedback, more time to respond to questions, and more validation. Teachers also consistently smiled, touched, and nodded at these kids more often.28 Cumulatively, all of these small moments added up to tangible gains in IQ for the randomly chosen few.

Since 1964, Rosenthal’s experiment has become a defining study in the relatively new field of mindset psychology, a branch of the discipline that emphasizes the critical importance of mindsets and expectations on achievement outcomes in the classroom and beyond. Other prominent psychologists, among them Dweck, have continued to build on this research, always to the same, cutting conclusion: our mindsets matter in ways we can’t see or predict.

As we’ve begun to revamp our own hiring procedures at Guardian, I’ve frequently thought about this research. In conversations with other Guardian executives about what role academic pedigrees should play in how we hire, I’ve found myself mulling over many of the same questions that Rosenthal must have contemplated more than five decades ago. If our mindsets and preconceptions affect the success of those around us, we have to take steps to readjust them.

Today there are more ways to acquire a skill than ever before. Universities are offering stackable credentials, the internet is brimming with microdegrees, nonprofits are putting on boot camps, and credentialing programs can teach a whole range of new skills in six months or less. Innovations such as blockchain, meanwhile, are harnessing developments in cryptography to transform the diploma into something that’s trusty, skills-based, dynamic, and transportable.

Amid all these rapid changes, however, it’s clear that if we want to incorporate these innovations into our workplace, it’s not enough to watch them unfold from afar. We have to change the mindset at the heart of how we think about talent—in the style of Chugach, Alaska—so that we can make real changes to how we hire, which skills we’re selecting for, and what kinds of people we’re ultimately choosing to join our team. After all, study after study has confirmed that academic degrees bear only a loose relationship to one’s performance at a job.29

Like many companies, mine is taking steps to reevaluate how we think about and measure talent. Guardian’s own Dean Del Vecchio is a wonderful example in this regard. Dean has led our digital transformation. He came to us with an MBA from the highly respected Villanova School of Business, but he didn’t get there in the usual way. In fact, Dean never even received an undergraduate degree. He tested out of a traditional college education by completing a series of technical studies, which gave him the business skills he needed to leapfrog directly into an MBA program.

It was a credit to Dean’s ingenuity—and to Villanova’s willingness to think creatively about skills and credentials—that led him to where he is today, and that redounded to our benefit as a company. If anything, the technological transformation that Dean spearheaded and the success it brought to the company is just another testament to the fact that potential trumps paper at all levels of a business—and that traditional pedigrees are far from necessary for traditional success.

As new credentials continue to redefine the educational landscape of the country, tech companies are also starting to downplay the importance of the college degree in favor of demonstrable skill sets. Google, Tesla, and Amazon have publicized their intention to pay less attention to college degrees as predictors of success and are hiring individuals who didn’t graduate from college at all. Professional service firms such as Deloitte, PwC, and KPMG are also minimizing the importance of college credentials. Recently Ernst & Young eliminated its college degree requirement entirely.

Some companies, eager to incorporate this shift into the way they hire, already have begun to hand over their talent search efforts to machines and algorithms that have been programmed to select candidates for potential over pedigree. Eightfold is one of these startups. Unlike more popular hiring programs such as ZipRecruiter, the app uses deep-learning algorithms to figure out which skills and aptitudes candidates likely have that aren’t explicitly listed on their résumés. Meanwhile, other companies—among them Unilever and Goldman Sachs—are making use of automated screening processes that so far have proven much better at matching candidates with company roles than the manual hiring procedures of years past.

Of course, using AI in hiring poses its own dangers. When Amazon deployed machine learning to build an experimental hiring tool, for example, the program wound up docking résumés that were submitted by women. As it turned out, the program’s learning model was based on a database of résumés that had been submitted to the company over the course of ten years, which were overwhelmingly from men—a gender imbalance that the hiring tool interpreted as a directive rather than a flaw.30 As machine learning and AI become increasingly sophisticated, however, data scientists and programmers are slowly figuring out new ways to teach these hiring tools how to redress these kinds of biases rather than reinforce them.³¹

In the meantime, organizations are spearheading efforts to reform the way companies recruit talent. Skillful, a nonprofit initiative of the Markle Foundation, is hosting trainings and workshops across the country in order to teach companies how to transition from degree-based to skills-based hiring. The hope is that these skills-based employment practices will help to match the talents of aspiring workers without college degrees—nearly 70 percent of Americans—with well-paying unfilled roles.³²

Opportunity@Work is a nonprofit social enterprise with a similar mission. By partnering with community organizations, companies, and community leaders, it establishes pipelines between aspiring workers with nontraditional backgrounds and employers who could benefit from their talents.³³

Ultimately the initiatives and action plans that are under way to change the way we train and hire speak to a wider truth about the age of automation. The future of work isn’t just about spurring the creation of more boot camps and microdegrees and massive open online courses. It’s about changing how we measure skills and aptitudes, how we recruit talent, and how we create learning environments so people of all stripes—including the Jennie McCormicks of the world—can thrive.

It’s about people.