While unemployment has soared in most sectors due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the tech industry is facing a significant need for qualified employees. There were 4.6 million open job postings in 2019, and the industry has ranked fourth for job creation since 2010. Nonetheless, tech roles are notoriously challenging to fill. What’s more, the dearth of talent comes with skyrocketing hiring costs — globally, companies are expected to spend an extra $2.5 billion to hire talent by 2030, according to The Korn Ferry Institute, a leading recruiting and HR consulting firm. 

Why are tech roles so hard to fill? Historically, tech employers have been reluctant to consider candidates who didn’t graduate from a four-year institution — even while acknowledging that 60% of the jobs they’re hiring for don’t require a four-year degree or higher. And in the U.S., there are stigmas associated with entering the workforce without a college degree. Often, this lack of higher education credentials is associated with vocational occupations such as electricians and nursing aides, not mid-level skills jobs like coders and computer programmers.

In addition, hiring practices have evolved with built-in biases. Job postings typically list a college degree among the requirements for candidacy, in addition to multiple years of exacting work experience, deterring applicants with backgrounds that don’t fit that mold. Moreover, finding a job in tech is often about who the candidate knows and the college or university they attended.

Today, however, a four-year degree is no longer the only path to employment. If the cost of tuition wasn’t impetus enough for seeking out alternative pathways, the pandemic has prompted college-bound youth to consider new and more modern methods to prepare for their careers. Many question the value of investing a four-year degree vis a vis the expense, safety concerns and experience (in the “new normal,” most classes are virtual). 

So as the tech industry envisions the future of its workforce, it may be time to rethink four-year college degree requirements. To be clear, this does not mean lowering hiring standards. On the contrary, it means dialing in more creative ways to recruit and hire candidates while widening the talent pool by sourcing employees from unconventional pipelines, such as apprenticeships. 

The Allure of Apprenticeships

While apprenticeships have been a centuries-old practice in industries such as carpentry and construction, the concept is still relatively new to tech employers. Still, the industry is slowly coming around to the value of apprenticeships as an alternative to fill their hiring pipeline with diverse candidates from non-traditional backgrounds. However, before it can adopt apprenticeships at scale, the tech industry as a whole must reimagine its beliefs about hiring — including the degree requirements and institutions. 

This “degree myopia” is particularly damaging for underrepresented segments of the population with college graduation rates that are lower than the national average, such blacks and hispanics age 25 and older. Apprenticeship programs can help remove some of the barriers to entry for these underrepresented groups, along with women and veterans, who are often overlooked in a traditional hiring process due to their lack of relevant experience. 

While many tech companies have developed in-house apprenticeship programs, such as Accenture, Microsoft and Pinterest, others are turning to outsourced options. Apprenti offers such a program; its full-service, holistic approach to adopting and creating apprenticeships enables all companies to fill hiring pipelines with qualified tech talent faster and at scale. As all companies hire tech, and compete for the same talent, it supports employers’ hiring efforts by leveraging the time-tested model of apprenticeships to create a faster path to qualified, certified and more diverse talent. Tech employers also have the option to partner with Apprenti to build their own in-house programs to develop and groom home-grown talent. To date, Apprenti has a presence in 18 U.S. markets, is a “pull” model working on behalf of the employer and thus continues to expand its footprint nationwide based on employer direction.  

Whereas a traditional apprenticeship might take three to five years to complete between on-the-job training and supplemental education, Apprenti stacks the education component up front, like a boot camp. In this way, its apprentices are able to get the training they need up-front immersively in mere months. First, Apprenti pre-screens candidates for aptitude, then they are interviewed by employers. Every apprentice has a consistent baseline of knowledge on entry, and initially, they work through established work processes with an internal mentor at the hiring company to get them up to speed. 

Working with Apprenti provides employers ongoing access to a pool of qualified candidates without having to go through an arduous and lengthy recruiting and hiring process — and a cost savings of 20-25% over traditionally sourced talent.  With a median age of 32 in tech apprenticeship, these candidates bring a maturity along with other work and life experiences that companies see value in, but would not have otherwise considered in a traditional hiring process. 

Shifting the Degree Paradigm

Loosening academic credential requirements can help to address the endemic talent shortage in tech. In addition, it may actually help tech companies maintain their competitive edge by opening recruitment to skilled applicants with diverse backgrounds and skill sets that, to their benefit, deviate from the “norm.” Apprenticeships can support this by helping to fill specific skill set gaps with on-the-job training. Thus, employers who modify their current hiring practices have an opportunity to discover hidden gems among diamonds in the rough. 

Of course, this is not universally applicable to all roles. Some jobs, like engineering and data scientists, require higher education degrees. However, entry- and mid-level positions such as software developers, data analysts, cloud administrators and cyber analysts can easily be filled by apprentices.

An additional benefit to rethinking academic credentials is it improves diversity and excellence in recruiting. Creating a more diverse workforce makes good business sense. Research from Gartner shows that companies that proactively foster diverse and inclusive cultures experience greater innovation, have higher-performance teams, achieve better business outcomes and surpass their financial goals. Clearly, these are appealing benefits for tech employers.

The bottom line is that, in order to close the talent gap in tech, employers must approach hiring differently. There are millions of tech jobs created every year, and only tens of thousands of college graduates with relevant degrees to fill them. Put another way, traditional hiring practices cannot scale — there will never be enough tech talent to close the gap from the existing college system. 

Therefore, tech companies need to consider sourcing talent in ways that are, admittedly, a significant departure from the way it’s always been done. But isn’t that what the tech industry is all about — innovation for the sake of improvement? To be sure, traditional apprenticeships date back to pre-Industrial Revolution days, however, we must leverage practices of the past to prepare today’s tech workforce for the future. As such, the four-year college degree paradigm on its own is no longer a relevant qualifier for tech talent. 

Looking through this lens, tech apprenticeships are indeed an idea whose time has come. 

---

¹ The Computing Technology Industry Association. Cyberstates. https://www.cyberstates.org/index.html#keyfindings

² Builtin. “Tech Apprenticeships Promise a New Path for Diverse Candidates.” https://builtin.com/diversity-inclusion/apprenticeship-training-programs-offer-diverse-hiring-solution

³ Builtin. “Tech Apprenticeships Promise a New Path for Diverse Candidates.”

⁴ Fuller, J., Raman, M., et al. (October 2017). Dismissed By Degrees. Published by Accenture, Grads of Life, Harvard Business School. https://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/dismissed-by-degrees.pdf

⁵ Gartner. “Diversity and Inclusion Build High-Performance Teams.” Sept. 2019. https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/diversity-and-inclusion-build-high-performance-teams/