December 31, 2024

“Companies are looking for new strategies in a light labor market to help them boost recruitment and retention, and realizing that potentially the degree requirement has historically been boxing out over half of the American workforce,” said Layla O’Kane, director of data analytic solutions at Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit that advocates for skills-based hiring.

November 21, 2024

The conventional degree was once as integral to the American Dream as getting the keys to your first home. But among the many norms the pandemic upended, the job market and what is required to succeed has been reimagined. We are all familiar with the idea of a glass ceiling, that invisible barrier that has kept women and other marginalized groups from progressing up the corporate or political ladder for invisible yet all-too-tangible reasons.

August 13, 2024

Prodded by such nonprofits as Opportunity@Work, which lobbies employers to hire based on skills rather than pedigree, more companies are opening previously college-grads-only jobs to people who have built their resumes through other kinds of training.

August 9, 2024

Seventy million people in the US — half the nation's workforce — are what Auguste calls STARs, or "skilled through alternative routes" such as through military service, workforce training programs, or on-the-job experience rather than a four-year degree.

August 5, 2024

Focusing on skills connects you with qualified candidates you may otherwise overlook and screen out, including over 70 million job seekers who are "Skilled Through Alternative Routes" rather than a four-year degree—or STARs, as coined by Opportunity@Work.

July 30, 2024

The company’s philanthropic arm also supports coalitions like the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)’s new Skills-First Center of Excellence and nonprofits like Opportunity@Work, whose “Tear the Paper Ceiling Campaign” has shed light on the challenges faced by the 70 million Americans who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes (STARs) rather than a four-year degree.

July 1, 2024

While half of the U.S. workforce does not have a bachelor’s degree, they are skilled through alternative routes (STARs)... One promising pathway for STARs to access good jobs is apprenticeships—which allow workers to earn and learn at the same time, debt-free.

February 20, 2024

According to Opportunity@work, an organization that helps skilled workers turn their learning into earning through research, there are over 70 million such workers in the U.S. They are STARs—Skilled Through Alternative Routes, such as military service, training programs, community college, or most commonly, on-the-job experience.

February 20, 2024

Organizations like Opportunity@Work have made it clear that people can build valuable skills almost anywhere — in the military, as a community volunteer, and certainly in the thousands of upskilling programs, community colleges, or trade schools across the nation.

February 16, 2024

American companies are hung up on the diploma. Facing a long-term labor shortage, employers are looking to expand the pool of potential workers. One group — people without a college degree — holds particular promise.

January 19, 2024

In what has been called the “degree reset,” the federal government and several states eliminated the degree requirements for many government jobs. Companies like IBM and the giant professional services firm Deloitte have too. Last year, a survey of 800 companies by Intelligent.com found that 45% intended to eliminate bachelor degree requirements for some positions in 2024. The Ad Council recently ran a campaign encouraging employers to get rid of the “paper ceiling.

January 12, 2024

“At SkillUp, one of our core principles is to be “Data-Driven, Heart-Led”. We’re thrilled to launch this new product experience that offers personalized support and aligns with the needs of millions of workers skilled through alternative routes (STARs) on their journey to high-opportunity jobs. And by doing so, we’re also excited to learn – through data and deep user insights – what works, and what doesn’t, in their ability to secure quality jobs,” said SkillUp Chief Executive Officer, Steve Lee.

January 11, 2024

While 21% said community should be the top priority for business, only 9% said it was the top priority in their own business, a detail economist Byron Auguste, cofounder and CEO of Opportunity@Work, said was "striking." "Stakeholder capitalism that truly delivers requires business models that transform more of the community into valued employees and priority customers," he says.

September 11, 2023

I’m one of more than 70 million STARs, workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes rather than through bachelor’s degrees, who make up half of the U.S. workforce (hardly exceptions to the rule!). STARs are adults who have earned their skills through pathways like community college, training and education programs, military service, partial college completion, and on-the-job experience.

September 5, 2023

Options are growing for Gen Z and others to acquire those skills, too. Instead of a bachelor’s degree, job-seekers can complete, for instance, Google’s Career Certificates, online training for skills like UX design and data analytics. Entrepreneur Scott Galloway’s Section 4 runs business strategy “sprints” meant to make a business school education more accessible, and organizations such as Opportunity@Work are connecting applicants “skilled through alternative routes,” such as the military or on-the-job learning, with employers.

September 4, 2023

The study grew out of previous research by academics and Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit social venture. That research focused on workers without a college degree but with work experience that could make them candidates for higher-paying jobs — a group called STARs, for those who are “skilled through alternative routes.”

August 30, 2023

In the U.S., at least 13 states moved to break their own paper ceilings and open up better jobs to those without degrees. These include both Red and Blue states, making the fight against credential inflation one of the few things both Republican and Democratic leaders can still agree upon.

August 28, 2023

A great example of such a collaboration is Opportunity@Work, a national nonprofit helping individuals work, learn, and earn to their full potential. They launched the Tear the Paper Ceiling campaign to spur public and private sector action to remove unnecessary degree requirements.

August 10, 2023

Alabama has gone public with what may be the nation’s most ambitious effort to tighten connections between education and work. Experts say the project could have major implications for skills-based hiring and the unbundling of credentials.

July 3, 2023

Meanwhile, forward-thinking employers could join the national movement to do away with bachelor’s diplomas as requirements for entry-level jobs, sending a clear signal that skills, not costly and exclusionary pieces of paper, are what matter in the 21st century.

June 27, 2023

Last year, the Maryland state government made a big commitment to investing in human potential when, encouraged by Opportunity@Work’s Tear the Paper Ceiling campaign, officials removed college degree requirements from state jobs. The state had been having a hard time filling jobs, and in the first year after the change, hires increased 41%, according to former Governor Larry Hogan.

June 19, 2023

Who stands to benefit? The nonprofit Opportunity@Work estimates there are 70 million STARs—workers who have been “skilled through alternative routes.” They include veterans, young computer programmers, and those who have taken time out of the workforce to raise children or care for a loved one at home.

May 10, 2023

"States are taking action to tear up this paper ceiling that excludes so many talented applicants. As the governors of New Jersey and Utah, we have implemented policies to prioritize practical experience and skills training over degree requirements for certain state government jobs."

April 13, 2023

The labor market has been pretty loose since the 2008 financial crisis, with this underpinning a considerable rise in credentialism that has seen employers demanding four-year degrees for even entry-level jobs. This has resulted in the most expensive form of education society currently has on offer being elevated above alternative routes, such as apprenticeships or so-called "STARS", which are people who are skilled through alternative routes.

March 30, 2023

Once considered a nice way to give people a leg-up, skills-first hiring has now permeated the national conscience. Nationwide movements like Tear the Paper Ceiling have captured media attention, bringing skills-first hiring practices and their benefits to the forefront. But with the global concern for workforce skills gaps, hiring for skills versus pedigree is now a business imperative.

February 28, 2023

“STARs are half of our skilled workforce. If employers don’t have a STARs talent strategy, they only have half a talent strategy,” said Opportunity@Work CEO & Co-Founder Byron Auguste. “Tearing the paper ceiling is about bringing in talent based on skills over degrees and performance over pedigree. This is innovation by inclusion – tapping into all talents and valuing workers' skills by whatever route they gained them.”

January 26, 2023

With an estimated 70 million people across the United States "skilled through alternative routes", the untapped market is considerable. What’s more, the upward mobility of these people is far less than that of their peers with degrees.

January 23, 2023

STARs are all around us, the more than 70 million workers in the U.S. who are “skilled through alternative routes” (STARs), rather than via college degrees, and they make up 50% of the U.S. workforce.

January 18, 2023

For their part, progressive Democrats emphasize the implications for equity; since Black and Latino workers are less likely than others to have college degrees, requiring them creates a “paper ceiling,” the impact of which is racially disparate, according to Byron Auguste, a former economic adviser to the Obama White House and CEO of Opportunity@Work, who collaborated with Hogan on the issue.

August 8, 2022

Yet many employers still have not changed their hiring practices to recognize the potential of these other pathways, or to explicitly screen in workers known as STARs (Skilled Through Alternative Routes). Too many businesses are choosing the strategies they know—looking overseas or poaching talent from their competitors—rather than investing the time and energy necessary to build a strong and sustainable tech workforce within the U.S. economy.

July 31, 2022

A recent study by Opportunity@Work suggests workers of color also pay a higher price for not having a college degree. Analyzing nearly 80 million job transitions between 2010 and 2019, it found that Black and Hispanic workers over 25 years old with a high-school diploma or equivalent who made a job transition were half as likely to end up in a high-wage job than their white peers who are over 25 and hold a high-school diploma or equivalent but not a college degree.

July 8, 2022

“It means a lot,” Groom said of Hogan’s announcement. “There are a lot of companies limiting out a lot of talent. You can have a degree and not have the knowledge and skill sets.”

March 17, 2022

As an alternative qualification, Maryland will seek out “STARs” (Skilled Through Alternative Routes) — those who are “age 25 or older, active in the labor force, have a high school diploma or equivalent, and have developed their skills through alternative routes such as community college, apprenticeships, military service, boot camps, and most commonly, on-the-job.”

February 17, 2022

But these people — skilled through alternative routes, or STARs, as she calls them — have been increasingly excluded from upwardly mobile jobs. Key roles in fields like computer support, health care and sales used to be filled by a greater share of workers without college degrees. Over the last 20 years, the numbers have shrunk.

January 21, 2022

For companies that develop their own pipelines of talent by being willing to invest in worker training and other creative strategies, "it's a big source of competitive advantage," says Byron Auguste, CEO of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit focused on employment.

January 20, 2022

Even with well-publicized efforts by many companies to make their hiring more inclusive, the sort of workers that command higher tech salaries are still those with (often elite) college degrees and years of what industry leaders consider to be the most relevant experience. They’re rarely among the 70+ million workers – identified by Opportunity@Work who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes (or STARs), rather than through a four-year degree–many of whom already have the skills to succeed in higher-wage jobs if employers would give them a chance.

January 14, 2022

In the shift to skills-based hiring, Opportunity@Work and other groups refer to such workers as STARs, for skilled through alternative routes. The term is meant to emphasize the skills that a large share of American workers have acquired instead of a degree that they lack.

November 3, 2021

The bias that equates low wage with low skill, and therefore low value, contributes to an unnecessarily steep climb for STARs – and also keeps employers blind to the talent they desperately need. This not only limits career opportunities and wage growth potential for individuals; it has a significant and systemic impact on the U.S. economy. For example, the computer and information technology sector — one ripe with job opportunities for STARs — is projected to grow 11% between 2019 and 2029. Yet, for every individual day an IT job remains vacant, the average organization can expect to lose more than $400.

October 18, 2021

Byron Auguste has co-founded a nonprofit organization, Opportunity@Work, whose purpose is to give a leg up to people he calls STARs, short for “skilled through alternative routes.” I interviewed him recently.

He told me that he’s haunted by the invisible tragedy of successful careers that never happen because applicants without college degrees aren’t given a chance. It affects first-time job-seekers, those stuck in dead-end careers, and older victims of layoffs who no longer qualify for the jobs they landed at a more forgiving time.

October 5, 2021

Whether you call this pool Black talent without four-year degrees or Black STARs (“skilled through alternative routes”), one thing is clear: These workers are not “unconventional” or “non-traditional.” They are the majority, they are extraordinary and they have been needlessly excluded from both opportunities and advancement for far too long. Many already work for companies struggling to find skilled talent in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

September 3, 2021

“You’re talking about proactively recruiting STARs just like companies choose campuses to recruit. They need to purposefully think about where to locate people who are Skilled Through Alternative Routes.”

April 27, 2021

There are millions of Americans who have the skills to get higher-level, higher-paying jobs but aren't considered for those roles because they don't have college degrees.

December 3, 2020

The findings point to the potential of upward mobility for people without a college degree.

October 6, 2020

By shifting from degree requirements to skills based hiring, employers can make their jobs more accessible to the 68% of Black workers who do not have degrees.

July 9, 2020

America needs to think differently about the value of jobs during the coronavirus recovery, writes Karan Chopra.

June 28, 2020

Among U.S. workers over 25, only 26% of blacks, and 40% of whites, have a bachelor’s or higher.

March 26, 2020

“We’ve seen in past downturns that what many employers have done is double down on college degrees and pedigrees,” says the founder of a nonprofit that helps build job skills.

Mar 04, 2020

Strada Education Network, today, announced the launch of Lessons Earned, a 20-minute interview-style podcast co-hosted by longtime education journalist Ben Wildavsky and his Strada Education Network colleagues. The first six episodes of Season One are available for streaming beginning today.

January 20, 2020

The widespread fears of a robot uprising are not only wrong – they are blocking us from better working conditions.

November 12, 2019

Byron Auguste, CEO and cofounder of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit social enterprise expanding access to career opportunities, was the keynote speaker. Auguste said the disconnect in the workforce is an opportunity gap — not a skills gap.

August 14, 2019

No market is more broken than the labor market, or with such dire consequences. In particular, 100 million-plus adults without four-year college degrees are deeply disadvantaged, screened out of millions of good jobs. Right now, workers without degrees might as well be in a different country to those with a B.A.

July 28, 2019

"The idea that there's some uni-dimensional merit that can be determined by how selective the school you go to is not only a bad idea," said Byron Auguste, former Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, "it's an untrue idea and it's a dangerous idea."

July 3, 2019

Today’s hiring practices are biased against people who do not have a college degree, says Opportunity@Work’s Byron Auguste. “We should not and cannot tell black people or women or older people that they can’t apply for a job. But employers can – and do – say that if you don’t have a bachelor’s degree, we don’t care about your skills. We don’t care what you can contribute. We won’t hire you.”

June 26, 2019

We often say today’s economic shifts are “unprecedented.” But there is a precedent – the American high school movement. A century ago, we adapted and built the strongest middle class the world had ever seen. Now we can create a lifelong learning system to rebuild our middle class for the age of AI.

May 19, 2019

Mastering code and applying it in business, some experts say, holds the promise of becoming the modern path to the middle class for people without four-year college degrees. And nonprofit programs like those used by Ms. Ball are considered central to getting people there. “Tech jobs can be seen as the new manufacturing jobs,” said Byron Auguste, chief executive of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit group that focuses on work-force issues.

March 19, 2019

Enterprise would certainly resist that notion of sorting by signal, as would others. But this isn't crazy talk. The same week the admissions scandal broke, Byron Auguste, an economist and the founder of Opportunity@Work, published an article in Forbes that questioned the signal of the degree. "Far too many employers use a college pedigree as a crutch — a simplistic shortcut when they lack an efficient way to narrow down their applicant pool," he wrote.

March 14, 2019

Despite earning better wages than those without degrees, college grads have increasing economic anxiety. Perhaps their concerns are a reflection of career insecurity rising from the bottom of our economy up. Maybe the success of those with college degrees is more tied to those without than we think.

February 7, 2019

A growing cynicism around the future of work tells us that workers in so-called low-skill jobs intrinsically lack the intelligence, ambition, and ability to master the skills needed for 21st century work. However, low wages do not mean low skill—and we devalue these workers at our own peril.

September 5, 2018

What really distinguished the environment in 1970 were the more effective policies and practices for navigating economic and technological changes. Put differently, it was more the rules of the game that created better pathways to the middle class — often making technology an empowering tool in the hands of workers like my father. This was not because of luck. It was because of deliberate choices, including long-term investments, by our government, industry, and citizenry.

July 5, 2018

Jobs Day tomorrow will once again evoke a never-ending debate around school, STEM, and salary. None of them explains the underlying patterns of dysfunction in the U.S. labor market. Here's what you need to know about the skills gap and how you can solve it.

June 27, 2018

Byron Auguste of Opportunity@Work has documented the number of jobs that require technical or advanced degrees that can be done by non-academic credentialed people—if only they get the opportunity.

June 26, 2018

One reason that businesses struggle to find capable workers is because they have increased their hiring from top-level universities, said Byron Auguste, CEO of the workforce training nonprofit Opportunity@Work. The problem is that these schools haven’t increased the number of students enrolled to match the demand, he explained.

June 4, 2018

Employers ought to do more as well. They rely too much on automated hiring tools that exacerbate the bias against workers who lack four-year degrees. To address this, 1,300 companies have partnered with Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., to create a platform for training and certifying non-traditional candidates for available IT jobs.

May 17, 2018

There are about 6.5 million job openings in the U.S., a record high. The number of people looking for work without success is falling as well, and this combination means that the economy now has close to one active job seeker for every open job. The unemployment rate is below 4 percent — another indication that workers who are actively looking for jobs can find them.

April 24, 2018

Auguste is CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, a non-profit organization expanding access to technology career opportunities for overlooked and underrepresented job seekers. Auguste spoke in San Francisco at the inaugural Workday Opportunity Onramps, a workforce development conference with a mission to connect driven individuals from diverse backgrounds with unfilled jobs.

December 21, 2017

Automation isn’t inherently a boon for those with means. As Byron Auguste—the CEO and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, an organization that connects people who lack credentials to jobs—said on a Brookings Institution panel earlier this month, it doesn’t “naturally empower the top of the economic pyramid.” Nor, he argued, is automation like gravity—a force of nature that can’t be stopped.

August 21, 2017

The guiding creed behind skills-based hiring is “if you can do the job, you should get the job.” Whether you learned web design by maintaining your church’s website, or you learned to code in the army reserve, or you graduated with a degree in computer science from a top-tier four-year college, equal skills should mean equal opportunity. And what’s exciting is that following this approach is win-win. It broadens access to our economy and promotes social justice. And, at the same time, companies that tap into this pool of applicants who took less-traditional paths to build their skills find that they have uncovered a significant competitive advantage, especially in markets where the cost of the most sought-after tech hires is constantly escalating.