Are uni degrees really that important any more?

I’ve spent a lot of my working life looking at resumés. When I helped to build a growing media company over 15 years, we didn’t have a fancy HR department for many of them. This meant that every time we posted a job advertisement, hundreds of CVs would flood my inbox.

After scanning each resumé one by one, I soon developed a strategy to process them. First, I’d look for the candidate’s current role, measuring up their competence and responsibilities to see if they aligned with what we needed.

There are many professions where a university degree will always be a necessity, but they’re becoming less essential in the eyes of hirers.Credit: iStock

I’d note how long they had worked there (anything under 18 months was usually an orange flag) and then compare previous roles and career progression to see if their skills improved over time.

The very last thing I noticed, if I looked at all, was any formal education qualifications. For me, the course that someone had once studied at university, or if they’d even been at all, was the least important thing about them. The work experience they had was all that really mattered.

As a hirer, I’m not alone. The necessity of university degrees in the workplace is increasingly being questioned. A recent Hays 2025 Skills Report, which surveyed more than 5000 hiring managers in Australia and New Zealand, found that 86 per cent were looking to skills-based hiring methods to find the right candidates.

A separate report by Workday last month showed similar findings – 93 per cent of leaders said they were comfortable hiring people based on their skills profiles.

A large chunk of young people are betting that the HECS debt will be worth it when they start looking for full-time work.

The world is changing fast, and universities are struggling to keep up. Entire industries are evolving rapidly around us, being rewritten in real-time by advancements in AI that are obliterating career paths and creating new ones in their wake.

Universities are valiantly trying to keep up with the pace, but when lesson design and course materials take years to evolve, the reality is that some subjects are simply becoming obsolete with each passing semester.

Yet, the default path from school to higher education remains strong. Almost two-thirds of year 12 leavers continue studying after they finish school – more than 50 per cent at universities, with the rest entering TAFE programs and other vocational education and training.

That’s a large chunk of young people betting that the HECS debt will be worth it when they start looking for full-time work.

Of course, there are many professions where a university degree will always be a necessity. I thank God that my doctor studied at university instead of just using ChatGPT to diagnose and treat me. The same goes for lawyers, engineers, architects, teachers, healthcare workers and many others.

But we need to question whether universities are the best way to prepare young people for a rapidly changing world.

I’d argue that I learnt substantially more from entering the workforce to watch, follow, fail and work my way up from the bottom than I ever did from university studies, where I mainly perfected memorising and regurgitating.

If I had the choice between hiring someone who’s just spent three years with their head only inside a textbook versus someone who’s spent three years learning inside the workforce, I know which one I’d choose.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com

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