A college degree used to be a requirement for a lot of jobs, but with available jobs outnumbering the unemployed two-to-one, employers are being less picky.
When workers are plentiful, requiring a college degree not only means getting employees who took on more education, it's a useful way to thin out the applicant pool, says UNO business professor Mark Rosa. But times have changed:
"That was a weed-out mechanism: college degree required, or you have to have five years of experience," he said. "The businesses are just getting worn down by the supply chain concerns and people not coming to work for whatever reasons and many have retired early."
Yahoo! Finance reports companies like Dell, AT&T, Google, Ernst & Young, IBM, and more are increasingly willing to ease up on those prerequisites, to hire much-needed employees.
"They gotta get their act together," explained Rosa. "They've got to get the company back running on all cylinders whenever possible."
Rosa says specialized work, like engineering, accounting, law, and medicine will always need some additional schooling, but with more job openings than job applicants, plenty of other jobs' requirements won't be as stringent.
