Posted on 07/02/2020 12:37:34 PM PDT by spintreebob
President Trump signed an executive order making federal hiring "merit-based," which means skills and competency for a job will take precedence over a college degree for many types of jobs.
In making this change, the White House believes it is playing catch-up to the private sector. "An over reliance on college degrees excludes capable candidates," Trump's order stated. It was signed June 26.
But the change to merit-based hiring may become a monumental task for federal agencies. It might mean rewriting job ads that emphasize competencies over degrees, as well as adopting technology that can translate an applicant's experience into skills.
"This is a change with far greater implications than might even seem obvious on the surface," said Donald Kettl, a professor at the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
Kettl said the executive order may prompt more interest in AI-type systems to scan applications and match candidates with jobs. It also will be "an opportunity for consultants who can help agencies meet the new challenges of this executive order," he said.
The U.S. government employs about 2.2 million civilian workers. Agencies have 180 days, or until the end of the year, to implement the order.
Merit-based hiring and skills
"A far bigger issue is the identification of the skills that positions require," Kettl said.
"Agencies will have to develop new, more detailed, and more tailored descriptions for each position," he said. "There's a lot to be said about coupling position descriptions with agency missions. But this will be a very big step, and it will have to be taken in a very short time."
Kevin Parker, CEO at HireVue Inc., believes the change to merit-based hiring can have positive social benefits. The degree requirement "excludes large sections of the workforce, particularly in the underserved and communities of color," he said. "When you are white or you're Asian, you have a 20% higher likelihood of even having a college degree."
The change will mean that agencies will look at competencies, such as an ability to work on a team or to learn -- those sorts of characteristics, Parker said. HireVue, headquartered in South Jordan, Utah, makes video interviewing technology for enterprises.
Government agencies are already using diverse technologies for finding and interviewing job candidates. HireVue's technology is used by some federal agencies to fill cybersecurity job openings. The company provides an on-demand interviewing platform that includes prerecorded questions so candidates can respond when it's convenient to them. HireVue also uses game-based technology to help assess learning agility, problem-solving ability and fundamental coding skills, among other attributes, Parker said.
For a job candidate's application to be successful, it will likely have to talk about the skills and attributes sought in the job description, Parker said. "It's less about, I got a 3.8 [GPA] at my college for a degree and more about the contributions I've made and the skills I've learned along the way," he said.
Now you won’t have to get some online degree from a diploma mill to hang on to your job. Good move.
Too many people are educated waaaay beyond their intelligence...................
No wonder the professors, lawyers, politicians, and CEOs are only working from the same playbook: they all graduated from the same 10-20 universities.
At the state or county level, whenever I contact a “governmental” employee (holding a $65,000 per year salaried position) by email, they will always call me on the phone to discuss the matter. One because they don’t want to memorialize their responses and thus be held accountable for them, and two because they have zero writing skills. They are functionally illiterate. If they reply by email at all, it is with one that is a stock reply that has been pre-configured for them. All they do is plug in your name and address. Disgusting.
It’s very hard to measure true merit. A good college degree(s) CSN admittedly be a rough proxy in that it demonstrates an ability to focus and perform required tasks. In previous times, it also certified some intelligence, reasoning ability, and subject matter qualification. Except for engineering and the hard sciences, those college outcomes Are mostly lacking nowadays. The commies jade destroyed much of academia into little more than communist party indoctrination centers that inculcate hostile and dysfunctional attitudes, racism, and “entitlement” in place of honest American values, positive ambition, and any other attributes for productivity and success at work or in life. ———- so most college degrees are worthless at best nowadays, and the feds are simply recognizing reality by discounting them in the hiring process. Indeed, much of the real world outside government has recognized this fact years for several years already. BUT I MUST SAY I’m concerned that this casting aside of verifiable standards might lead a future administration to turn our civil service into more of A political patronage charade than it already is. Imho, a really positive first step now will be to cut the federal payroll in half
There’s still the unavoidable problem that every employer will have to deal with: Unless you know a prospective employee personally or can get references who are trustworthy people in your business, you are going to need a system of credentials/certifications to measure a person’s competency in any given line of work.
Winning!!!
Probationary period
All the jobs I listed above require skill, hard work, team work and tenacity.
We should allow industry leaders to become teachers too.
The government and teacher’s union wants to control who can teach through certifications.
Many government workers are not even US citizens now. They are Indians.
“It’s very hard to measure true merit. ...”
A very good and in my opinion accurate post!
As Reagan might say, we won’t be abandoning universities; they abandoned us.
Uh oh. Is he ending the corporate crony taxe dodger collusion with preventing citizens from degrees by harsh cut classes. Then they turn around and must hire H1Bs with lousy educqtion, but a piece of paper. O wait he just let 600,000 H1bs in.
You bring up an interesting point. Government workers come in two types: Employees and consultants/contractors. Will we see mid-level management that makes these decisions shift more toward employees or more toward consultants?
(full disclosure. I am currently consulting to government.)
True. We are having to “block all emails” from our local colkege. The administrators and unions keep sending out communistic or racist political bullsheit that only serves up distress us why we voted to pay taxes for the joint. They’re using our money to undermine and attack us instead of providing quality education
Very good. It takes a businessman to understand that talent is talent, whether it comes from Columbia or the School Of Hard Knocks. The object is to get the job done, and done well.
I can’t count the times my friend and I, both without degrees, were tasked with cleaning up the messes made by our highly-degreed, but mostly incompetent co-workers.
Post University Degree Future - bump for later...
I’m surprised feminazis and blacktivists haven’t opposed this vigorously; their unearned reparations degrees forced companies not just to hire them, but promote them as well (under threat of lawsuit).
Females have been over 50% of college classes for decades; they still have little interest in STEM fields - and White guys stopped going to school for them because nobody is allowed to hire them.
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