Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins a growing number of executives who suggest that a specific field is less critical to employment in today’s competitive job market.
The most important thing, he says, is that you can “do one thing really well.”
When asked by Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, “What should kids study these days?” Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of critical thinking and learning values.
Rather than pinpointing a particular topic for aspiring Gen Z professionals, the billionaire Harvard dropout emphasized that mastering a skill outweighs having a business or economics degree, as such tenacity applies to various business areas can be applied.
Zuckerberg explained his “hiring philosophy” by pointing to his daughter, who is already 40 pages into writing a novel about mermaid crystals.
“If people have shown that they can go deep and do one thing very well, then they have probably gained experience in the art of learning something and taking it to an excellent level, which is generally quite applicable to other things ”, he concluded. .
High grades do not guarantee that you are a top worker
It’s not the first time the Meta mastermind has emphasized that raw talent and personality are more important than credentials.
Zuckerberg was well ahead of today’s ‘skills first’ recruitment revolution – in fact back in 2015the tech genius emphasized that he “would only hire someone to work for me directly if I was working for that person” and that his team looks for people whose values align with those of the company.
As companies increasingly eliminate degree requirements from their hiring processes, Zuckerberg’s hiring philosophy is becoming more common.
Google, Microsoft, IBM and Apple have all eliminated their long-standing degree requirements to remove barriers to entry and recruit more diverse talent. Meanwhile, recruiters worldwide are five times more likely to search for new hires based on skills than on higher education.
JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon recently revealed that the Wall Street giant has hired “four or five thousand ex-felons” because talent doesn’t just come from college.
“I don’t necessarily think that just because you go to an Ivy League school or get good grades means you’re going to be a great worker or a great person or anything like that,” he said. “When you look at people’s skills, it’s amazing how skilled people are at something, but it wasn’t on their resume.
Similarly, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook reiterated that there is a “mismatch between the skills coming out of colleges and the skills we think we need in the future.”
Therefore, he said that especially aspiring programmers, no degree needed to be successful during the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting.
Cisco CEO in Britain, David Meads, dropped out of school at the age of 16. Just like Zuckerberg, he said Fortune that “attitude and ability are more important than whatever letters are after your name, or whatever qualifications you have on a sheet.”
