These 8 major companies no longer require college degrees for high-paying jobs

There are at least eight major companies that have announced they are no longer requiring college degrees for high-paying jobs, instead opting for skills-based hiring for those jobs.

Those companies include:

1. Walmart
2. Home Depot
3. Verizon
4. IBM
5. Google
6. Tesla
7. GM
8. Accenture

Walmart especially stands out for its efforts to hire people without a college degree, being the largest private employer in the U.S.

The company, with its 1.6 million strong workforce, said it was changing job descriptions to hire more based on skill and promote from within.

“We’re rewriting job descriptions for our campus (headquarters) jobs to factor in the skills people possess, alongside any degrees they hold,” the company said in a statement. “This creates an either/or option for an applicant: to be considered for the job, you can have a related college degree or possess the skills needed for the job, whether through previous experience or other forms of learning.”

Technology sector employers have also moved toward skills-based hiring.

What has not changed is hiring for jobs that never required degrees or jobs in certain professions such as lawyers or doctors.

But even with this shift to put less emphasis on college degrees in hiring, studies have shown that there is still a disparity between those with college degrees and those without getting those choice jobs.

“Unfortunately, what we found is for the most part, employers are still hiring the same people they were before,” Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, told CNBC.

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Katherine Rodriguez can be reached at krodriguez@njadvancemedia.com. Have a tip? Tell us at nj.com/tips.