Will Looking at Skills, Rather Than Just Degrees, Help Walmart Attract More Talent?

Walmart is aiming to create more career opportunities for its employees by rewriting requirements for certain corporate jobs and offering more short-form certificates for skills. This move could help the retailer promote more high-level workers from within by reducing the need for college degrees — potentially making Walmart into a more attractive employer overall.

The retailer has committed to making $1 billion in career-driven training and development investments by 2026. The retail giant noted that it is “constantly creating pathways to in-demand roles in our company,” which has already led to 75% of salaried managers at U.S. stores, clubs, and supply chain facilities starting in hourly roles. 

However, these higher-level front-line roles have never required degrees, which makes the rewritten descriptions a new approach for Walmart. The new listings will look at skills as well as degrees to help the company find employees with the necessary talents, no matter where or how they developed them.

“Ultimately, Walmart believes the U.S. workforce system needs to transition to a system that recognizes and understands skills in the same way it recognizes and understands college degrees,” said Walmart in a press release. “This gives talented, skilled workers who do not have degrees the same benefits as people who do. Harvard Business Review refers to this approach as the new-collar workforce.”

Walmart will pay for associates to earn college degrees, and the retailer is currently adjusting its Live Better U education benefits to include more short-form certificates. The retailer now offers 25 short-form certificates through its partnership with Guild, up from five in 2020, including for data analytics and supply chain management.

Many potential employees and even existing associates don’t know about Walmart’s career pathways, and the retailer is planning on using technology to make it easier for people to discover their options. The company’s Me@Walmart and Me@Campus apps will be used to help associates search for career-advancing moves based on their job preferences and skill sets, and the apps will recommend personalized career paths as well as advertise in-demand job openings.

Better career opportunities could help Walmart avoid the labor crunch that still impacts retail as a whole. While the labor market has improved since the end of the pandemic, 20% of retail and wholesale trade job openings were unfilled as of July 2023, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, the retail quit rate was 2.8% — second only to foodservice at 4.9%.

Many retailers are raising workers’ wages, but Walmart stands out by promising its employees full careers. It will be interesting to see how this impacts hiring, retention, and development of talent at the company.