Elon Says Skills Matter More Than Degrees. What If He’s Onto Something?
PhD? Not required.
College degree? Not necessary.
High school diploma? Forget about it.
Elon Musk turned some heads recently when he tweeted that a lack of any sort of degree won’t disqualify you from working at Tesla.
Musk was recruiting for Tesla’s artificial intelligence team as the electric car company is looking to advance its autopilot features to full self-driving capabilities.
“Educational background is irrelevant,” Musk tweeted, “but all must pass hardcore coding test.”
My first reaction was: Is he serious? Would Tesla really recruit candidates without post-secondary education or even a high school degree? This had to be a stunt, right?
But Musk has said these things before.
“There’s no need even to have a college degree at all, or even high school,” he said in a 2014 interview. “If somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it’s not necessarily the case.”
Musk is among a growing number of influential people who’ve expressed a lack of faith in the current educational system. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel famously wants young people to skip college and is even paying some to do so.
Instead of a degree, Musk says he’s looking for “evidence of exceptional ability. And if there is a track record of exceptional achievement, then it is likely that that will continue into the future.”
So, I do think Musk is serious, and I do think he’s onto something. I believe his views are an indication of the future of both education and work. I believe more companies will to start embrace Musk’s philosophy as they race to update their product architectures to stay on pace with emerging technologies. As a result, the future of education and learning will look a lot different.
Think about it. What if employers stopped specifying degree requirements and instead put a higher emphasis on skill requirements? What if all that was needed to gain employment was to prove you had the skills to pass their test and the drive to keep learning? What would that mean for the power of the degree?
It’s the equivalent of a high school basketball player skipping college for the NBA.
Of course, talent only takes you so far. To go pro, you need to hone your skills, develop them, refine them. Nobody is disputing that. But maybe our traditional approaches of developing talent are outdated. Technology, entire industries in fact, are advancing at an unprecedented speed, and humans are living longer than ever before. In this ever-changing environment, how could we possibly acquire all the skills we need by our mid-20s?
While there are no solid statistics on how many times people change careers during their lifetime, the consensus is that we have to be more adaptable than ever. A LinkedIn study found millennials will change jobs four times in their first decade out of college. That’s compared to two job changes by Gen Xers their first 10 years in the workforce. Imagine what will happen when humans live and work even longer. How many jobs will a 150-year-old have had?
It’s insane to expect that we will have only one career pathway and that it can be shaped in its entirety by the time we finish college.
So what’s the alternative? Do we expect people to go back to college and belly up another six figures every time they want to change careers? Certainly not.
We need to re-shape how people learn and acquire skills for the 21st century. We need programs outside the traditional university and community college system that allow you to gain these skills at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time. These new learning avenues need to be accessible throughout our lives and they need to be easily adaptable to the changing needs of employers.
At The Lanterman Group, we have some ideas on how to do this the right way. We’re all about enabling the future of work in an industry that can’t afford to wait for the current educational system to catch up – advanced manufacturing.
Currently, manufacturers are struggling to find talent, period.
“The search for skilled talent—ranked as the No. 1 driver of manufacturing competitiveness by global manufacturing executives—appears to be at a critical level,” a recent report found. “In fact, Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute research reveals an unprecedented majority (89 percent) of executives agree there is a talent shortage in the US manufacturing sector.”
Manufacturing executives identify shifting skills due to the introduction of advanced technologies as one of the top reasons why more than half of open jobs in 2028 (2.4 million) could remain unfilled, according to the report.
Most companies expect the difficulty in filling high-skilled positions to triple over the next few years, according to the study. “Even at present, many of these jobs are taking longer to fill, stretching out to months of time where a company is missing key workforce to deliver open orders, expand production, or respond to customer needs.”
Filling these jobs is just one problem. “Even more challenging could be the task of understanding what jobs will look like in the future and the skills needed to perform them,” the report says. “Forty-seven percent of today’s jobs might be gone in the next 10 years […] But the overall headcount is expected to increase, meaning these jobs would transition into other skills, likely infused with technology.”
As a result, business leaders overwhelmingly support innovative programs that will help people connect to new jobs through up- and re-skilling, according to a study by WeWork and the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative.
TLG is in the process of launching such an innovative program that will provide professionals with accelerated and intensive skill acquisition and pathways into additive manufacturing careers. To support this endeavor, Lanterman was recently awarded a highly competitive Phase I SBIR to accelerate our efforts.
Our program will be shaped by employers, focus on competency development, and be accessible to those who are starting out or those who are looking to advance their career. In other words, it will be built for a 21st-century economy that puts skills above degrees.
If you are interested in learning more about our new endeavor, please reach out to me directly at ahughes@thelantermangroup.com for more ways to get involved.
Stay tuned!