Interview with Matt Sigelman, President of the Burning Glass Institute
A skills-first economy requires employers to find new ways of evaluating prospective employees’ qualifications, says Matt Sigelman, President of the Burning Glass Institute in Philadelphia, which conducts data-driven research to frame the potential for new approaches to the future of work. Sigelman explains how governments can help expand access to high-value job opportunities and generative artificial intelligence (AI) 's role in skills-based hiring and offers practical advice on moving away from degree inflation.
What is behind the shift from degree requirements to a skills-based approach?
Most employers assume that someone with a traditional degree has certain skills. It’s an easy filtering mechanism, but a degree doesn’t represent a given skill. It’s a set of assumptions and presupposes that those without a degree don’t have those skills. Meanwhile, many parts of the world are experiencing talent shortages. Populations are getting older, birthrates are declining, and economic uncertainty is also impacting job markets. When companies struggle to find workers while using an inefficient means to filter out candidates—like traditional degrees—they are throttling the supply of talent.
All of this brought us to a place where employers agree that we need to put aside degree requirements and identify the skills required to perform a job successfully. Policymakers and governments are also on board because employees will end up having access to more jobs—at the entry level and as they make their way up.
We are seeing good progress. Globally, the number of jobs that have shed degree requirements has increased fourfold in the past decade and continues to accelerate. The problem is we are not seeing meaningful progress in hiring patterns. For all the talk of skills-based hiring in the United States, we only see one in 700 non-degree hires that previously required degrees. So far, a skills-based approach has been limited to only a few companies. Requiring degrees has become a crutch to make hiring simpler and seemingly mitigate the risk of bringing in someone who cannot do the job.
What can be done to de-risk skills-based hiring?
There are several subtle ways employers can adapt to encourage a skills-based approach. First, they can generate greater awareness of workers pursuing non-traditional routes. Celebrating their successes permits hiring managers to do the same. Second, they can track high performers without degrees, identify what they have in common with peers with similar backgrounds, and figure out what their managers are doing to promote their success. We also need to be very purposeful in defining success criteria and the skills an employee needs to do a job. It’s not enough to institute a mandate to drop degree requirements. Employers need a plan to evaluate prospective workers and their skills.
How do your findings apply to emerging markets?
Many findings apply similarly to Western countries and developing markets. Leaders in low- and middle-income countries with university degrees want to hire workers with university degrees, which means they are also restricting the flow of potential new hires. In the United States, 38 percent of the workforce has degrees. In developing countries, it’s less than half that number. If 80-90 percent of the workforce in emerging markets doesn’t have a traditional degree, high-value opportunities will be out of reach to most people, which has profound implications in the developing world. Social stability depends on opportunity and upward mobility. The other reality is that emerging economies don’t have the capacity to educate large populations. If you think about the number of traditional university seats in a country with a large population like Brazil or India, it would be impossible for them to construct colleges and universities that could serve millions of people. We need other mechanisms for qualifications.
What does a skill-first economy look like?
We depend on degrees as the primary way workers signal to prospective employers the capabilities that they bring. The key underpinning of a workforce that runs on skills is where skills are the unit of measure of learning versus degrees. It’s the ability to consider bringing people in and promoting them from within, with skills being the denominator of learning.
If someone takes an online course, it might not mean anything to an employer. At the Burning Glass Institute, we found that only about 13 percent of credentials led to meaningful wage gain. We need to create a set of credentials that are of currency to the market. We have started looking at what happens when someone seeks a particular qualification: Do they get better jobs? Does their income go up? We need a nutrition label on credentials, so employers know what skills a worker has and what qualifies them for a particular job.
Governments need to work closely with employer communities and industry associations to define a set of standards to get as many people as possible into high-value, high-growth positions. At a national and regional level, governments and ministries need to recognize that their economic development strategy requires a talent strategy, and a talent strategy requires a learning and education strategy.
Emerging economies don’t offer many credentials, so it speaks to the importance of taking a strategic approach: what jobs and skills will be the most impactful to economic growth?
What will the rise of generative AI mean for skills-based hiring? Can you share an example?
Generative AI presents both opportunities and risks when it comes to skills-based practice. Regarding opportunity, we know that things like the depth of knowledge in a particular area, writing skills, and language can be barriers to entry into certain jobs. Generative AI is great at making knowledge available across topics, including languages. It’s also proven quite effective at writing for us. We may see that more people have access to jobs in professional or non-professional environments.
The risks are twofold. First, while AI can handle lower-value tasks, it can’t replicate a level of expertise that is only achievable through years of on-the-job experience. For instance, Gen AI might be able to write a decent press release. But, it isn’t going to be able to identify key messages, which only an experienced communications professional could do. We may wind up in a world where entry-level work looks entirely different, and we will end up relying on degrees more than we do today. Second, there is potential risk depending on how Gen AI is taught and used. If it’s used to replace our efforts versus augment them, it’s akin to the fear in education that children are using AI tools to cheat. They won’t obtain the skills they need to succeed in a job.
What three pieces of advice would you give to companies striving to eliminate degree inflation in favor of a more equitable, skills-based practice of hiring?
First, define a set of roles to experiment with. Many companies make the mistake of trying to pursue a sweeping generalization and, as a result, cannot focus on where they are most likely to find success. Second, define what skills are required and what evidence demonstrates that someone has acquired those skills. Lastly, that which gets measured gets managed. Understand what is working and what is not and redefine expectations accordingly. IBM is a great example of a company that made a concerted effort to remove degree requirements and embrace skills-based hiring. They did reinstate degrees in some instances, but the point is that they were measuring and analyzing where skills-based hiring was working and where it wasn’t.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Published in April 2025
Matt Sigelman is President of the Burning Glass Institute. He has dedicated his career to unlocking new avenues for mobility, opportunity, and equity through skills.
Matt and his team created the field of real-time labor market data, a breakthrough innovation that has transformed the way that policy makers, researchers, employers, education institutions, and workers understand, plan for, and connect with the world of work. By mining billions of job openings and career histories, Matt led the company that has become Lightcast to become a leading authority on the global market for talent, harnessing advanced AI and natural language processing to render data that provide unprecedented granularity on the changing landscape of opportunity for workers.
Matt has served as a Visiting Fellow and is now Senior Advisor at The Harvard Project on the Workforce. Before launching the Burning Glass Institute, Matt served as CEO, and then Chairman of Lightcast for over 20 years. Previously, Matt worked at McKinsey & Company and at Capital One. Matt holds an AB from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard.