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Silicon Valley is starting to realize that the huge talent pool of nontraditional candidates may be the answer to its pipeline problem.
The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees.
IBM's head of talent organization, Sam Ladah, calls this sort of initiative a focus on "new-collar jobs." The idea, he says, is to look toward different applicant pools to find new talent. "We consider them based on their skills," he says, and don't take into account their educational background. This includes applicants who didn't get a four-year degree but have proven their technical knowledge in other ways. Some have technical certifications, and others have enrolled in other skills programs. "We've been very successful in hiring from [coding] bootcamps," says Ladah.
For IT roles, educational pedigree often doesn't make a huge difference. For instance, many gaming aficionados have built their own systems. With this technical grounding, they would likely have the aptitude to be a server technician or a network technician. These roles require specific technical knowledge, not necessarily an academic curriculum vitae. "We're looking for people who have a real passion for technology," says Ladah. He goes on to say that currently about 10% to 15% of IBM's new hires don't have traditional four-year degrees.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3069259/why-more-tech-companies-are-hiring-people-without-degrees
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:22PM
Last is creative problem analysis
There's a bathtub curve to this where the blue collar "git er done" union craftsmen types are good at this but are never optimal. Engineers do the same thing but much cheaper faster and provably safer. Then in between that's the bottom of the bathtub curve where people are really good at regurgitating what the boss wants to hear to the authorities in charge, but they tend to have very little agency or creativity.
So likely they're trying to jump over the liberal arts degree holder types and grab talent out of the blue collar segment of society.
Its kinda like entrepreneurship where only the extremes are present, successful new businesses are either created by drop outs who are master plumbers (or programmers) or really smart folks, but in the middle roughly no successful businesses come from MBAs who took a class in small business or something like that.