Making Degree-Gained Skills Visible for Skills-Based Hiring

What can aid the process?

While a global shift towards skills-based hiring is gathering pace, the skills gained from a degree are unlikely to feature in the skills-based hiring process.

Why?

Because the skills gained during the course of a degree are:

• Rarely explicitly stated

• Usually inferred from the degree title

• Often invisible

Issues for skills-based hiring

This causes issues for skills-based hiring processes because the skills aren’t readily machine-readable or even human-readable.

It is not clear what a degree holder’s full range of competencies are.

Identifying transferable skills

In my last couple of posts I’ve used my own experience as a case study. I explored transferable skills generated from my degree in Drama & Theatre Arts and how I have applied those skills in work contexts. This process demonstrated how:

• Many of the skills I’ve applied to my work in technology stem from my degree in Drama & Theatre Arts

• Transferable skills can be applied in very different domains, e.g. drama > tech

Classifying skills

One of the challenges with identifying such transferable skills, however, is how to classify and describe them.

Skills can be described in different ways and the same skill or competency might be articulated quite differently for different sectors, industries or domains.

My own experience is a case in point, the skills I gained from a Drama & Theatre Arts degree were not explicitly articulated by the university in terms of transferable skills (although that skills gained would be transferable to broader contexts was expressed in the course literature).

Competency frameworks

In recent years, frameworks have been developed to create consistency of definition and grouping of skills.

One such framework is the Durable Skills Competency Framework defined by the Education Design Lab.

The framework identifies nine soft skills a group of employers and educators determined to be in-demand, with sub-competencies of observable behaviors. The skills are:

• Creative Problem-Solving

• Critical Thinking

• Empathy

• Oral Communication

• Self-Directed Learning

• Initiative

• Collaboration

• Resilience

• Intercultural Fluency

Degree-gained skills mapped to durable skills

Again, using my own experience as a case study, I mapped knowledge gained from my degree in Drama & Theatre Arts to the Durable Skills Competency Framework.

The following provides a summary of how my knowledge maps to the durable skills, and the reasoning based on the sub-competencies in the framework.

Understanding skills

The reasoning for each mapped durable skill summarises ways in which I have applied the knowledge gained from my arts degree in various technology-related roles (I go into the types of applications in previous posts).

But would a recruiter naturally think a degree in Drama & Theatre Arts is a good fit when hiring for technology-related roles?

I doubt it.

Degrees and Skills-Based Hiring

The skills gained from a degree are commonly not presented in ways compatible with the skills-based hiring process.

Taking the examples of skills I’ve shared from my own degree experience:

• It’s unlikely the skills gained would be inferred from the title of the degree alone

So

• It’s unlikely they would be identified in skills-based hiring processes

Additionally, while those skills have been validated because my knowledge was assessed and validated in order to gain the degree, they have not been validated independently as skills.

Skills visibility and validation

Given this, what would make degree-based skills more visible and trustworthy for skills-based hiring?

Obviously it would be enabled by:

• Explicitly stating skills gained in degrees. Some work is being done in this regard but it is limited and universities may wait to see what competency frameworks, skill taxonomies and skills-based hiring approaches become prevalent

In the meantime, it would be aided by:

• Mapping skills to a competency framework. This presents skills in terms of machine-readable, standardised definitions that mean the same skills can be easily compared with those of other candidates.

• Gaining microcredentials. Microcredentials provide machine-readable, granular ways to recognise skills. They provide details about the skills, the reasons for award, and how they have been validated. (Education Design Lab awards microcredentials for each skill in the Durable Skills Competency Framework.)

• Describing applied skills. Sharing compelling examples of the skills applied in practice builds trust in ability and they can be included as evidence in microcredentials, on public-facing professional profiles and in interviews.

I provide skills-based consulting services to recruiters, policy makers, developers and jobseekers. If you‘d like to explore how we can work together, please get in touch by contacting me here.

Skills-based hiring series

This post is part of a series on skills-based hiring. Subscribe to receive notifications of new posts.