GM Dropping Four-Year Degree Requirement For Employment
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GM has dropped the four-year college degree requirement for many jobs and will instead transition to skills-based hiring practices for certain roles, Tammy Golden, GM’s executive director of diversity, equity and inclusion, told Automotive News in a recent interview.
Golden, who is also the Detroit-based automaker’s head of workforce strategy, explained to AN how the automaker has implemented a new three-pronged approach to its hiring practices. The first step involves a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion, which is part of GM’s vision to become the most inclusive company in the world, while the second focuses on workplace innovation and removing biases that may impact an employee’s experience on the job. The third step is workforce design, which focuses on creating clear pathways for employees to join the company that may not have four-year degrees, but have relevant real-world experience.
“From a soft skills perspective, we really needed people who can connect with people,” Golden told AN. “When you focus on what’s required of the job versus, say, a four-year degree, as your ticket in, it allows you the opportunity to open the aperture to another pool of talent.”
Golden also said that GM that nearly half of the 500 team leaders it has hired in recent months are from “underrepresented categories,” in the auto industry, including women and people of color. By dropping the four-year degree requirement, the automaker now has a larger talent pool of potential candidates to select from when hiring, which will help it achieve its diversity, equity and inclusion goals and also expand its workforce in a meaningful way.
GM CEO Mary Barra said in 2020 that she wants the automaker to be “the most inclusive company in the world,” through way of hiring practices, representation and partnering with diverse media. The automaker also donated $4 million to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 2020 and set up a dedicated Inclusion Advisory Board to promote inclusion and racial justice within its ranks.
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GM operates in a very competitive industry that continues to rely on ingenuity and new ideas to succeed. There are industries that are static but motor vehicles is not one of them. It is ever changing and fiercely competitive.
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, there have been thousands of ideas and inventions and innovations that changed civilization and brought about greater productivity, communication, comfort. and infinitely better lives for all of mankind and it is still happening today. Virtually every one of those advancements has come from the minds of a very narrow subset of the population. To be a company reliant on advancement, creativity, and daring but then to exclude from employment the very people who are responsible for virtually all of history’s great invention is insane. Further, advanced education teaches critical thinking, establishing a hypothesis, testing ideas, and all the very concepts necessary for a person to challenge the status quo and change the world. Those enlightened and adaptive minds are precisely what GM needs. To establish a policy of hiring based on race alone and then to purposefully lower educational requirements so as to be able to hire more members of that race is simply unwise.
Barra has a lofty goal that some might call noble but it’s entirely unrealistic in her industry and not based on an informed understanding of civilization. It’s perhaps like wanting to win the Super Bowl but then expecting to do it with the most diverse and inclusive team possible. One wins with the most talented and capable, not a team selected solely on race, gender, and sexuality; a team like that will lose every time.
The Super Bowl analogy is spot-on.
Funny how no body mentions the “entitlement” that many of todays “under 30” crowd are afflicted with. I actually work in the industry, and I see the “talent” coming out of prestigious institutions on a regular basis. Somehow, accurately creating a spreadsheet seems to be grounds for promotion to manager. smh. But you keep believing it’s because of the brownies or the gays, when it’s really entitled white boys from Ohio, Indiana, etc, who are awesome at shooting themselves in the foot; career wise. I used to think it was just the smartest kids in their high school, not being able to adapt to being avg or less, around other engineers; but nope, just entitlement. I deserve this, I have worked so hard already, is the mantra. smh
The article does not mention engineers, so for those who spend their days far away from this environment, there are a lot of positions, that have required degrees, that don’t really need degrees to do. Some quality in the plant, industrial controls monitoring, etc. Things that an avg intellect can be trained to do. This is not the “that” that others make it out to be in their incessant whiny racist and homophobic rants.
Clearly we all have White privilege
If you have a degree, there are definitely better companies to work for than GM
Inclusion is job #1. Vehicles? I guess, if we have the time.
It is little wonder that Toyota, Volkswagon and Hyundai et al. are eating GM’s lunch. GM is no longer run by “car” people, but sociologists. General Motors Institute used to be a top source of automotive engineers. It is now called Kettering University where a math teacher drives a BMW.
There’s not m much to getting hired at GM. Just show up and say “I cant wait for EV’s to take over the World” Your Hired.
so many college degrees today have little to no bearing o workplace so companies need to basically train them anyway
now engineering and other degrees are needed. but GM top management has been a disaster for decades from the first year of corvair which did get fixed but damage done. the Vega, the citation, the Cimarron the bolt is the current disaster seems every decade they make a disaster some eventually fixed but japan has greatly profited by gm fails
what really ticked me was the company who was saved by billions of tax money or in the 30t debt was first to import a china made SUV Buick Envision
Jr233 if you take the blinders off you would be able to see other manufacturers blunders.
Like other manufacturers GM can’t find suitable employees. So they must widen the pool. This will help but it won’t be sufficient. Overall manufacturers and other industries are all competing for workers from the same pool. Automation won’t solve this. To keep businesses on home soil and to continue the growth labor will need to be supplemented by foreign workers. It is inevitable.