It’s Time to Tell A New and Better Story About the Skills Movement

In the evolving landscape of employment, the narrative around skills-based hiring is more critical than ever. While this approach, which values abilities over traditional credentials, has the potential to address labor shortages and meet the demands of modern industries, its success hinges on how effectively we communicate its benefits. The current discourse is fragmented and often misunderstood, undermining the movement’s potential impact. To truly harness the power of skills-based hiring, we must craft a cohesive and compelling narrative that resonates with employers, educators, and jobseekers alike, turning aspirational ideas into actionable strategies. 

Using Data to Beat Myths and Misinformation

A 2023 joint survey by the Wall Street Journal and NORC, a research organization at the University of Chicago, revealed that 56% of Americans no longer think a college education is worth the cost. As that figure has jumped 40% since the last survey in 2013, particularly among 18–34 year-olds, so has the increasing number of employers, educators, and jobseekers who now believe that skills are the currency and language that will define the future of work. Skills-based efforts are seen as an intervention and solution, but in practice, evidence for impact continues to be sparse and hard to qualify. 

What was once a fringe discussion about equalizing career opportunities for people who don’t have a four-year college degree has now become a frontispiece in the debate about how to meet employers’ ever-growing talent needs. Statistics show that skills-based hiring can increase the size of a talent pool by 19 times in the United States alone. This shift from fringe to mainstream has also positioned the skills-first movement more squarely at the intersection of postsecondary education and work, which has driven broader and richer conversations about where it fits in the future economy. 

But a counter-narrative has been brewing in the background that interprets the skills movement as an all-or-nothing approach, powered by uncertainty about how to translate this aspirational excitement about skills-based practice into the implementation of real-world approaches that work.

Uncertainty is an incubator for myths and misinformation, and critics regularly misrepresent what the skills-based movement is and does. It’s true that the counter-narrative is a direct result of shifting hyperbolic messaging, and the sometimes confusing, sometimes contradictory language used by many of the major players in this space. We know, both from our experience and conversations with partners in our field, that the skills-based community of advocates has a narrative problem, and we’re eager to solve it.

Shifting the Skills Narrative

To begin, we partnered with Purpose, a social impact communications firm, to analyze our current narrative and identify opportunities to improve it. Purpose did extensive research and interviewed dozens of skills-first stakeholders, including employers, educators, policymakers, industry groups, and national nonprofits, to better understand how narrative was either enhancing or undermining our attempts to build a cohesive movement.  
 
As a product of that project, this brief distills the outcomes of the research and conversations led by Purpose into five ways the narrative needs to shift and coalesce around two themes: how today’s skills narrative is falling short and what leaders in the skills-based movement can do to support its wide-scale growth.  

Narrative Shift 1: From “Skills vs. Degrees” to “Skills and…”

At times, messaging around skill-based hiring has seemed to endorse the approach as a replacement for degrees, and at least hinted that degree-based hiring was coming to an end. Not so. Although this is an aspirational (and tempting) argument, largely because degrees are often used as an unverified proxy for work readiness, the truth is that for a majority of job postings in the United States, degrees continue to be a requirement.  
 
Although a growing number of companies—including major corporations like Delta, Lockheed Martin, and IBM—have implemented skills-based hiring and removed degree requirements from a variety of roles, research released earlier this year by the Harvard Business School and The Burning Glass Institute estimated that there was only a 0.14 percentage point hiring increase of candidates without degrees nationwide. Annually, that translates to just 97,000 new jobs out of 77 million hires. 
 
Dropping degrees isn’t enough to lead to change. Instead, we advocate a “Skills and” narrative as a complementary approach to existing talent assessment systems. Rather than substituting the degree, being skills-first focuses on expanding criteria to focus on the broad range of education and experience a jobseeker brings to the table. This framing can bring the jobseeker’s full constellation of knowledge and experience to life, allowing for a deeper, measurable, and comparable analysis of both the skills embedded in the degree and others not directly related to the degree. “Skills and” can also detail skills specifically embedded within different achievements, like a liberal arts degree, to contextualize a candidate’s ability to perform the nuanced details of a specific job.   

Narrative Shift 2: From Making a Social Impact Case to Making the Business Case

Early proponents of skills-first efforts often framed their arguments around social impact: that using skills as the basis for hiring would help counter longstanding inequities that kept people from accessing well-paid careers. This remains an important part of the case for skills-first efforts, but it is not the whole of the argument. Social imperatives by themselves— particularly ones grounded in education and employment—are much less effective.  

For skills-first practices to reach wide-scale adoption, we need to build on earlier equity arguments with a crystal-clear business case as well. This argument needs to demonstrate that skills-based practices increase productivity, worker retention, and the development of more cost-effective ways to upskill workers in the face of economic pressure. It must include return on investment data based on stronger talent matching, increased retention and productivity, and lower cost-to-hire and upskilling processes.  Actionable evidence is highly compelling to business leaders, and a necessary part of the growth strategy for the skills-first ecosystem.  

Narrative Shift 3: From a Silver Bullet to a Tool in the Toolbox

As is often the case with exciting new innovations, early adopters of skills-based practices have tended to oversell their potential to overcome longstanding challenges within the learning-to-employment pipeline. Instant employability for everyone! Universal applicability across all jobs, industries, and regions! Their enthusiasm is welcomed, but the reality is that incredibly complex problems are rarely, if ever, solved by a single solution, and new ideas tend to require a lot of refinement and evolution to effectively work outside of the laboratory of early-stage idea generation. Skills-based hiring is no exception.

Resumes and cover letters and even the dreaded job interview will not go away, at least not altogether. Skills-first practices are one of many approaches employers can and should be using to create good jobs and attract the qualified talent to fill them. They aren’t the only option, nor do they represent a panacea. The narrative needs to shift to contextualize skills-based efforts as a tool in the toolbox, a set of solutions that work in collaborative synergy with other hiring and advancement approaches.  

Narrative Shift 4: From Expecting Change Overnight to Transformation Takes Time

The skills-based movement has predicated much of its argument around alarm and urgency. The old systems of learning and working are under siege in the face of economic change, particularly the transformation being wrought by automation and artificial intelligence, and the ongoing labor shortage. If we don’t adopt new ways to prepare workers of the future, we’ll all be left behind.  
 
Combining this argument with the over-simplified narrative of skills-based approaches as a potential silver bullet, many in the field began to expect (and argue for) transformation to take place rapidly, which has led to disappointment when it hasn’t materialized. The skills-based ecosystem is doing itself a disservice by creating the false promise of super-quick change when the reality is that building, testing, and expanding a new practice—especially when integrating it into pre-existing widespread systems—is not a quick effort.  
 
Instead, the narrative needs to focus on transformation takes time rather than promoting long-term, massive-impact goals (i.e., transforming the skills-based economy). Let’s focus on the important incremental steps being taken along the way and continue to build the evidence of impact before we rush the results.   

Narrative Shift 5: From Unproven Outcomes to Celebrate Evidence

The story of the skills economy so far has largely been confined to speculative case-making for the problems skills-based approaches may be able to solve. When proven models do exist, they’re in siloed spaces with narrowly defined use cases and results that are rarely shared outside of the organization or group leading the innovation. This is natural for any effort early in its adoption cycle. But it means proof that skills-based approaches work can be hard to find.  

Now that the ecosystem of skills-based efforts has expanded sufficiently to include thousands of organizations experimenting with different approaches, the narrative needs to shift to celebrate evidence, highlighting where we see success and how that success can translate to other use cases and business models across industries and the education-to-work divide. And it’s not just the message that needs to change. The work itself needs to shift toward this goal as well by incorporating data collection and transparent evidence sharing into skills-based initiatives as a default.  

Keep That Energy Going

The skills-based hiring movement is at a pivotal crossroads. As we continue to promote this movement as a field, we must unify our messaging, share compelling stories of success, and provide clear, actionable guidance for stakeholders. By doing so, we can ensure that skills-based hiring evolves from a promising concept to a mainstream practice that delivers real benefits for employers and jobseekers alike.  

Our time to act is now. By working in coordination on a cohesive narrative, we can transform the skills-based movement into a lasting legacy that shapes the future of work for generations to come. 

JFF would like to acknowledge Walmart for their continued support of this initiative.