Large companies, especially those in the tech sector, have been vocal about the need for skill-based hiring. IBM said it cut bachelor’s degree requirements from more than half of its U.S. job openings in 2021.
For many companies, these changes accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when staffing shortages pushed employers to rethink their requirements.
“You don’t need any legislation to push the private sector to do it, but you do need legislation to allow the public sector to do it,” Pollak said.
Before the pandemic, the state’s job vacancy rate was just under 15%. Now it’s at 20%, Erickson said. The growing vacancy rate was the chief concern behind the bill, Bauer-Kahan said.
One reason for the high vacancy rate is that the number of state employees is growing. Since 2019, the state has added roughly 20,000 positions, an increase of more than 8%, according to Travis, a spokesperson for the state’s human resources department. The same challenges exist in county and city governments, which tend to face even higher vacancy rates, according to a report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
More than three-quarters of jobs in the county of San Diego don’t require a degree, a significant increase since the county started reassessing its jobs in 2022. Riverside County approved a motion to consider alternatives to degrees, although the county was unable to provide data before publication about what changes had been made.
As San Francisco faces an “unprecedented hiring crisis,” a spokesperson for the human resources department, Jack Hebb, said the city has changed the requirements for 267 out of 915 job classifications over the past 10 years. Roughly a quarter of those changes happened after the start of the pandemic, he said.
Filling state government jobs in other ways
Erickson said she believes that changing education requirements can promote equity by removing barriers and can “absolutely” help fill vacancies, but that it’s not a panacea. “People look at pay first,” she said. While the state offers better-than-average pay for many jobs, such as custodial work, other positions, such as police officers, pay below the average wage compared to other workers across the state.
The Service Employees International Union, SEIU, is concerned that some employers may change education requirements to lower wages, said Sandra Barreiro, a governmental relations advocate for SEIU. While Barreiro didn’t endorse Bauer-Kahan’s bill, the local service workers union representing public sector employees, SEIU Local 1000, did.