🧠 Are companies ditching university degrees as hiring requirements? A few years ago, a bachelor’s degree was a universal prerequisite for entering the job market — most postings opened with “bachelor’s degree required.” Today, the scene has shifted. Major global companies are redefining what competence looks like, with the ability to do the job mattering more than where or what you studied.

This doesn’t mean degrees are disappearing — but it does reflect a change in how candidates are evaluated, driven by the accelerating pace of technological change, the emergence of new roles that university curricula can’t keep up with, widening skills gaps across many sectors, and a growing desire among companies to access a broader talent pool that isn’t limited to degree holders.

In this week’s edition of The Enterprise Guide, we’re looking at the rise of skills-based hiring, how companies are putting it into practice, and what this shift means for jobseekers in Egypt.

Is Om El Donia’s job market making the same shift?

A university degree remains a core requirement in the vast majority of job postings across Egypt’s public sector and traditional private sector — though indicators are suggesting the early stages of a shift. Demand for traditional administrative roles has fallen by around 12%, while interest in alternative professional and technical career paths has risen by 45% in specific sectors including IT, digital content, and freelance work, according to a recent Capmas report.

Legislative barriers: Egypt’s Labor Law No. 14 of 2025 imposes a significant constraint on the concept of skills-based hiring: professional regulations and syndicates require a higher academic qualification as a mandatory condition for appointment in many fields. Both employers and employees can face penalties for practicing a profession without the appropriate license, drawing a hard line around a skills-based hiring philosophy in most regulated sectors.

How do companies assess skills outside traditional degrees?

#1- Micro-credentials: These are awarded after short training programs focused on a specific skill, offering a faster and more specialized alternative to a traditional degree. Companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon issue digital badges that document the skills participants acquire — something that has strengthened employer confidence in this category of professional accreditation.

#2- Projects and practical experience: Work completed independently — through freelancing, volunteering, or contributing to open-source projects — remains among the strongest evidence of skill, because it reflects the candidate’s ability to apply what they’ve learned in a real working environment.

#3- Portfolio: A body of previous work is one of the most important ways to demonstrate competence, particularly in creative, technical, and media fields — allowing candidates to show real examples of what they’ve done rather than simply describing their skills on a CV.

#4- Pre-interview assignments: Many companies send candidates a task before the interview that reflects their thinking and the quality of their work — writing code, designing an interface, analyzing data, translating an article, or producing a piece of content — allowing the company to assess actual ability independent of academic credentials. Worth noting: there’s a meaningful line between a reasonably short assignment and a complete project under the guise of evaluation, which in many cases amounts to companies taking advantage of candidates’ desire to get hired.

How to attract the right skills

If your company is moving toward skills-based hiring, there are steps you can take when writing a job posting to attract the right candidates and reflect the skills actually needed, rather than focusing solely on academic qualifications.

#1- Lead with the skill: Instead of writing — for example — “bachelor’s degree in computer science required,” describe what’s actually needed: the ability to build an interactive data dashboard, manage digital marketing campaigns, or analyze data using Python. This opens the door to candidates who developed those skills through study, work, or self-learning.

#2- Be specific about the tasks: Don’t stop at describing general responsibilities — spell out what you expect the person to actually do after they’re hired: improving customer experience, increasing sales, developing a specific product, using AI tools. That specificity helps candidates self-assess their fit before applying.

#3- Align the posting with how you’ll evaluate: Skills-based hiring isn’t just about rewording a job ad — it extends to how you assess candidates. Use practical tests or short tasks that directly measure the skills listed in the posting, so your selection criteria are tied to actual performance.

Who’s doing it

Google has moved in recent years toward reducing its reliance on a university degree as a core hiring requirement, placing greater emphasis on skills and practical experience when evaluating candidates. It now hires significant numbers of people without degrees, drawing on programs like Google Career Certificates, which qualify candidates in areas including data analytics, IT support, and project management.

Microsoft has built a hiring culture centered on measurable skills and continuous learning, placing greater weight on a candidate’s ability to acquire new skills and adapt to technological change rather than their academic credentials. It has also expanded its professional training and certification pathways to help candidates demonstrate competence across technical fields.

Apple has taken a similar approach, reducing the degree requirement across a number of roles and moving toward evaluating candidates on the basis of practical skills and problem-solving ability rather than academic qualification alone.

Thmanyah, as a regional example, is a Saudi media and content company that states explicitly on its careers website that it does not require years of experience nor specific degrees — its selection criteria center on problem-solving ability and initiative over specialization or credentials.

More broadly, this shift hasn’t been limited to tech companies. Bank of America, Delta Air Lines, and Walmart have all joined the list — placing greater weight on skills and practical experience in hiring for roles across banking, retail, and aviation. That said, this shift applies most readily to technology, finance, retail, aviation, media, and the arts. In regulated fields — med., law, engineering — the degree and professional license remain non-negotiable.