Skills-based hiring has moved from conference panel to policy in a lot of organisations. Degree requirements have been stripped out of job specifications across sectors, on the reasonable argument that a degree was never a proxy for the ability to do most jobs.
The harder part arrives afterwards. Once the degree filter comes out, recruiters need something to put in its place — and the credentials that fill the gap are far less standardised than a university qualification. A candidate arrives with a certificate from a training provider nobody in the hiring team has heard of. Is it a serious qualification or three days in a hotel conference room?
That question is now a routine part of screening, and most organisations are answering it inconsistently.
The comparison problem
With degrees, comparison is straightforward even if predictive value is debatable. Institutions are accredited, courses are of known length, and the credential means roughly the same thing across employers.
Vocational and academy training has no equivalent shorthand. Two candidates can hold certificates with near-identical names representing wildly different amounts of work — one from an accredited institution running several weeks of assessed, supervised practice, the other from a weekend course with no assessment at all. On a CV they look the same.
This is most visible in operational fields where the training is physical and the consequences of poor preparation are immediate: trades, transport, emergency response, and protective services.
Protective services is a useful worked example because the spread is so wide. Entry-level security work is well documented — the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' security guard occupational profile sets out the standard duties of monitoring, access control, emergency response and reporting. But the specialised end of the field, executive and close protection, demands a substantially wider skill set: advance work, secure transportation, threat assessment, client communication, documentation and emergency medical capability. The training market has responded with everything from accredited multi-week academies to two-day certificates, and the certificates do not announce which is which.
Five questions that separate them
Recruiters assessing any non-degree credential can get most of the way with the same five questions, whatever the sector.
Is the provider accredited by a recognised body? Accreditation means external oversight of curriculum and delivery. It doesn't guarantee quality, but its absence means nobody outside the provider has examined what they teach.
How much of the programme was supervised, assessed practice? For operational roles this is the single most useful number, and it's more informative than total course length. Ask candidates directly — those who trained seriously tend to know it.
Which licences or certifications are included, and which are separate? Providers bundle very differently. A candidate may hold a strong training credential but still lack a statutory licence the role requires, or vice versa.
Who delivered the training? Instructor background matters more in operational fields than academic ones. Practitioners teaching from experience produce different graduates than generalists working from a manual.
What does the provider claim about outcomes? This is a useful proxy for institutional seriousness. Providers who guarantee employment or specific earnings are usually the ones to discount. In regulated education markets those claims are often restricted outright, and providers who are careful about them tend to be careful about the rest.
In the US market, accredited academies such as Pacific West Academy sit at the longer-form end of the protective services training market, running multi-week programmes across protective operations, secure transportation and emergency medicine. The contrast with short-format certificate providers illustrates the point: same broad credential category, materially different preparation.
The veteran candidate pool
The same framework matters for a talent pool many employers say they want and few screen well: service leavers.
Veterans arrive with genuinely transferable capability — situational awareness, working under pressure, team coordination, logistics, technical skills — but often without the civilian vocabulary or credentials that applicant tracking systems are configured to detect. Many use education benefits on vocational rather than degree routes, which puts them squarely in the category recruiters find hardest to assess.
Employers who build a defensible framework for evaluating vocational credentials get earlier access to that pool. Employers who default to degree-equivalence screening filter them out and rarely notice they have.
Publicly available occupational data — the US Department of Labor's career and training resources among them — gives recruiters a neutral reference point for what a role actually requires, independent of what any provider claims.
Making it operational
None of this needs a large programme. It needs a documented internal standard: what your organisation accepts as evidence of capability for a given role, applied consistently.
In practice that means recording which providers and credentials you've assessed and what you concluded, adding the five questions above to screening for non-degree candidates, and revisiting the list periodically, since training markets change faster than qualification frameworks.
Removing the degree requirement was the easy part, and largely the right call. Building something rigorous enough to replace it is the work that determines whether skills-based hiring widens the talent pool or simply lowers the bar.