Walmart’s announcement coincides with the trend of many large companies in sectors ranging from technology to automotive to consulting, such as Google, IBM, Tesla, GM and Accenture.
With 1.6 million employees in the United States, the largest private-sector company in the country, Walmart is constantly hiring at its more than 5,200 stores and at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. That Herculean task took a turn this fall, when the company said many of those corporate positions will no longer require a college degree.
“We are rewriting job descriptions at our campuses (headquarters) to take into account people’s skills in addition to the degrees they hold,” Walmart said in a corporate blog in late September, co-written by Lorraine Stomski, senior vice president of associate learning and leadership, and Julie Gehrki, vice president of philanthropy. “To be considered for the position, one can have a related college degree or possess the skills needed for the job, either through prior experience or other forms of learning.”
Walmart’s announcement coincides with the trend of many large companies in industries ranging from technology to automotive to consulting, such as Google, IBM, Tesla, GM and Accenture, to hire qualified staff to fill what are sometimes referred to as “new jobs.”
It also comes amid increased debate about the value of a college education, long seen as a prerequisite for landing a corporate job and building a career, and concern about the debt burden on students. Labor shortages, efforts to diversify workforces and the introduction of generative artificial intelligence into employees’ lives are also changing hiring and retention approaches.
“We sincerely believe that every learning counts,” Stomski said in an interview in late October, before Walmart’s earnings blackout period began Nov. 1. “We want to look at these jobs and say, what do they really require? Yes, many of them may require a college degree, but many of them do not. We’re not saying college degrees don’t count. What we’re saying is that for many of our on-campus jobs it’s a trade-off.”
The starting point for developing Walmart’s new hiring process, according to Stomski, will be to identify the most in-demand corporate jobs that arise in its business and the specific skills needed for them, and then determine whether a college degree is necessary. In either case, employees will be able to use the company’s career enhancement and retraining platform, Live Better U, which offers free college tuition at partner institutions such as Southern New Hampshire University, the University of Arizona and the University of Denver. “If you need a college degree, you can get it debt-free,” Stomski says.
Walmart is one of the leading retailers, Target is another example, that has partnered with the Guild education platform to facilitate access to a debt-free degree.
In addition to undergraduate and graduate degree programs, Live Better U also offers 25 short-term certificates-skill-building courses that take less than a year to complete-in corporate-level fields such as data analytics, cybersecurity (where the gap between open positions and available talent is wide), supply chain management and business economics. “In previous years, people were looking for a college degree in cybersecurity,” Stomski says. “Now they can get a cybersecurity certificate in six to nine months.”
Ben Wildavsky, a visiting professor at the University of Virginia who studies education and skills development, and author of “The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials, and Connections,” believes Walmart is taking the right approach. “They’re trying to create an ecosystem within the organization that develops competencies, but also allows for short-term credential credits that, in many cases, can contribute to a degree. It’s all about fitting things into people’s lives in a way that is feasible for them,” he says.
At the same time, Wildavsky stressed that disparaging the value of a college degree is a mistake. “We have to accept that what economists call the human capital theory of the value of the degree is actually true. What that means is that when you go to college and you get a degree, it’s not just a piece of paper. People really learn things in college.”
Walmart also stresses this point.
“It’s not about getting rid of college degrees,” Stomski said, adding that many of Walmart’s corporate jobs will still require them. “It could be an ‘and,’ meaning you could come in with some college and supplement it with skills and experience,” he said.
CREATING A BROADER EDUCATION SYSTEM AND CAREER PATHWAY.
According to Wildavsky, in addition to the specific skills acquired in such popular careers as teaching, nursing or computer science, a broad college education also imparts non-cognitive skills, often referred to as soft skills. “They learn how to communicate, how to work in teams on projects, how to plan and execute over time. That’s why it’s so important to do what Walmart is doing,” he said, “which is to try to make all of this a broader system.”
Stomski agreed that college students can learn critical thinking and problem solving skills, but “those [interpersonal skills] are not unique to college degrees,” he said. “You can gain those experiences by serving in the Marines,” he added.
The corporate world is not the only major job market where this shift is occurring, and it is arguably already more settled in the public sector. On Tuesday, Minnesota announced that the state would drop degree requirements for most state jobs, becoming the latest in a growing list of states doing away with two- or four-year degree requirements.
Examples of Walmart corporate positions that will not require college degrees include operations and merchandising, but Stomski declined to be more specific. As for the number of jobs that would fall under this new heading, “there’s a chance it could be hundreds,” he said. “We’re in the early stages, but that’s what we estimate.”
The move away from a narrower focus on grades for the corporate position comes during a period of downsizing at large corporations. In August 2022, Walmart began cutting about 200 corporate jobs as part of a restructuring effort in a tougher economic environment.
For its part, generative AI – which has only been on the public radar for a year, since OpenAI launched ChatGPT – is fast becoming a skill that could affect all kinds of jobs in nearly every business sector, including retail. To that end, in August, Walmart launched an internal generative AI tool called My Assistant for all of its campus workers. “From speeding up the writing process to serving as a creative partner to summarizing large documents, My Assistant has the potential to change the way our associates work and solve problems,” the company said in a post on LinkedIn.
To familiarize its headquarters staff with the chatbot, Walmart has initiated a training program that includes an online tutorial. “We’ve created a very secure playground where associates can go into My Assistant to ask questions and learn how to use the prompts,” Stomski said. “We’re starting there so we can really be the coaches of the business as we start to get more intimate with AI.”
Another factor in Walmart’s shift to skills-based hiring is to help promote diversity among its corporate workforce, Stomski said. “We’re removing unnecessary barriers so we can access a broader and more diverse talent pool,” he said. “One of those barriers is degree requirements. If we move to an either/or strategy, we will significantly open up the pool of candidates to a more diverse group that reflects the communities we serve.”
Colleen Ammerman, director of Harvard Business School’s race, gender and equity initiative, says a talent management strategy like Walmart’s avoids trying to push random numerical targets. “It’s smart for companies to think about how to access top talent and not put up arbitrary barriers, whether it’s a crude screening tool-do you have a four-year degree? – or more subtle barriers, in terms of how we perceive people of different identities,” he said.
Ultimately, according to Stomski, Walmart’s revamped hiring process “is going to unlock the potential for many of our [corporate] associates to develop their careers and get into better-paying jobs, which helps them save money and live better lives. It’s going to affect all people’s practices in a good way.”