Facing rapidly evolving workforce demands, human resources professionals are looking past the education section of candidates’ resumes, and focusing on skills instead.

Around 90% of CHROs now say their organization has a greater need to hire outside the four-year college degree, according to a new survey of over 1,000 HR decision-makers from ETS, an education testing company. That’s likely because around 79% of HR professionals also predict that in the near future, they will struggle to find strong candidates for their open roles. Workers, for their part, are well aware of the pivot; around 81% of global employees believe that by 2035, evidence of new skills acquired will be as valued as a university degree.

“This is not about replacing degrees—it’s about balancing them with real, demonstrable skills that keep people employable and businesses competitive,” Michelle Froah, global chief marketing and innovation officer at ETS, tells Fortune.

The idea of skills-based hiring and upskilling workers has been a major trend over the past few years, as employers try to expand their pool of candidates by focusing on people who can do the job no matter what their educational background. The prohibitively high cost of higher education has also made hiring managers reconsider what kind of workers they might be leaving out by favoring pedigree over ability. And the question has become even more pressing with the advent of AI, which has dramatically impacted the thinking around which skills are actually valuable, and who has them. 

Many prominent business leaders, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, have talked about skills as the future of hiring. In fact, a 2023 U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey found that 95% of executives and HR heads say nontraditional candidates perform just as well, if not better than, degree-holders.

Silicon Valley CEOs have been skeptical about college education for many years. In one of the more extreme cases of this idea, Palantir CEO Peter Thiel has a fellowship that pays students $100,000 to drop out. And most recently, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to throw cold water on the entire higher education system, saying college is no longer needed to land a role in the current market. 

“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today,” said Zuckerberg on a recent podcast. “I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are…really big.”

Preston Fore
preston.fore@fortune.com

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