“It’s not often that we come before you asking you all to limit our agency’s ability to do something, but here we are,” said a director for Washington state’s Office of Financial Management (OFM), Sheri Sawyer. The agency is behind another smart step toward hiring people for what they can do, not just for the framed paper on the wall.
House Bill 2309, now signed into law, builds on previous common-sense reform removing unnecessary two- and four-year degree requirements from state jobs. This year’s policy closes another gap: State civil-service classifications may not require a postgraduate degree as the only way to prove someone is qualified for a role unless that degree is required by law. If the job can be done by someone with the right skills and experience, the state cannot and should not shut that person out because he or she lacks a master’s or other advanced degree.
People become qualified for a job in various ways, including on-the-job training and performance-based promotions, apprenticeships, internships, military service, vocational education and plain old experience. As Harvard Business School once put it, “Jobs do not require four-year degrees. Employers do.”
Work should always be built around the skills and abilities actually needed to do the work well, not degrees. Our new economy, the price of college and grade inflation also demand this kind of reform. When state government leans too hard on academic credentials that are not legally necessary, it screens out capable applicants. That hurts workers, taxpayers and agencies trying to fill positions with people who can deliver results. Research shows that when employers follow through on skills-based hiring, workers without degrees hired into newly opened roles saw higher pay on average, and employers saw better retention.
This policy change is practical, and it received unanimous, bipartisan support. Primary sponsor Rep. Mari Leavitt, D-Tacoma, has become a go-to lawmaker for workforce mobility and workforce needs, which makes sense for someone representing a district with a strong military presence.
During a hearing on the bill, Rep. Jim Walsh, R-Aberdeen, asked a good question that deserves revisiting. Why not just get rid of the required plan OFM is required to produce? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to get rid of the plan and leave the agency with broad discretion? Maybe that’s the next step.
HB 2309 offered good policy: A postgraduate degree may be valuable in some roles, but where it is not required by law, it should not be a requirement that excludes qualified workers, including those with valuable institutional knowledge. Workforces need people who can do the job, not people who merely collect the right parchment.
