Photo: Walmart
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.
Discussion Questions
How can Walmart benefit from hiring corporate workers based on skills as well as degrees? Will this move enable Walmart to promote more workers from within to eventual leadership roles?
Poll
Loading …BrainTrust
Mark Ryski
Founder, CEO & Author, HeadCount Corporation
Roland Gossage
CEO, GroupBy
By looking beyond academic credentials and considering workers’ skills, Walmart significantly broadens the pool of potential workers it can hire. Human capital is vital to any successful retail enterprise and Walmart is taking meaningful steps to attract and retain more of them. Looking beyond traditional academic credentials will provide more workers with more opportunities for career advancement. This effort, along with other employee training programs, will help make Walmart an even more attractive employer. More pay is great, but workers need opportunities and that’s what this approach will provide.
I am sometimes skeptical when I hear, “There’s an app for that”, but this sounds perfect. In a marketplace that revolves around digital communication, Walmart is making the conversation available where people will first want to look, and then want to do their due diligence. Smart move by Walmart.
Every company should be in the business of ‘upskilling’ its employee base, from junior associates to senior leaders. It’s cheaper to train and educate internally vs continually hiring from the outside. And it provides a big win for a company’s culture and how the employees view the long-term value of the company. There’s no doubt these decisions will help Walmart grow talent from within and find the next generation of middle and senior leaders for their company.
Will looking at skills rather than just degrees help Walmart attract more talent? In word, yes. And not just Walmart.
Requiring a college degree for many jobs never made sense. Turning away a talented person with experience because they lack a degree is just stupid. In my opinion, especially in retail, talent should top a degree every time.
This is a great move for Walmart. It not only gives internal employees who enter via a store track more opportunities to advance, but it enables them to tap a much larger talent pool, and no doubt will improve their diversity metrics. There are a lot of really smart people who never went to college. Whether due to financial constraints or circumstances. And with the cost of college now so high, it’s great to see a large employer like Walmart being more creative in it’s approach to career advancement.
I’m fascinated by these developments. Colleges and universities should pay close attention, because if you read between the lines what they’re really saying is that college degrees are not delivering the skills that businesses need. One of the biggest complaints around economic inequality is that someone can’t really make a living with just a high school degree, or a general devaluing of certifications in favor of degrees (that don’t deliver the easily measurable skills that a certification does). And for a company like Walmart, there is potentially portability value for the employee – yes, it’s a Walmart certification, but other companies, knowing what that encompasses, could value the knowledge and experience this signals to the market.
Skills and capabilities are always considered when interviewing for a job, regardless of a degree. Even with the highest degree in education, that doesn’t guarantee an effective employee. Education and capabilities do not always go hand-in-hand. It’s smart to consider the employee’s abilities over a diploma. I’m not suggesting that education doesn’t mean anything, but sometimes it can be pushed toward the bottom of requirements when what you want can be found in experience, trained skills, and even common sense.
As a career University professor, I have believed that a University degree is often overrated & not required of all high school graduates. While the building trades (carpentry, plumbing & electrical) have always been college alternatives, the Walmart program breaks new ground in this area. Kudos to Walmart for taking this approach.
A great move by Walmart but I would suggest they take one other step and in some cases move always from present skills and look more at the attitude that an employee brings to the job, for example wanting to learn and grow. Skills can always be taught if someone has the mental capacity and the right attitudes.
However, these higher-level front-line roles have never required degrees,
So, how, then are the req’s being rewritten (at least in away that reflects “skills not just degrees”)?? I’m really struggling to understand exactly what WM is doing here.
There are a lot of talented individuals in the workforce without degrees. This transition to skill-based hiring, in addition to evaluating potential degrees an individual may have, is a big step toward the “new collar workforce,” as described by Harvard Business Review. For Walmart, this increases their potential talent pool at a time when many retailers and restaurants are short-staffed.
In addition to expanding the external talent pool that Walmart is hiring from, these changes will help to create more opportunities for existing team members, helping to promote more long-term career growth. It will be interesting to see how well they execute their plans to utilize technology to better educate employees about these opportunities to continue their education and skill-learning. In order to see true success, they’ll need to increase employee engagement with the program.