Should we disregard educational qualifications in the recruitment process?

I do not think there is any ground swell of opinion in business to disregard educational qualifications and I would not hold my breath waiting for one .

Whilst undoubtedly there is a huge amount of pressure placed on candidates especially at 16 and 18 I am not sure there is any real correlation between this pressure and the wishes or desires of business. Most of it now seems to come from (and I am not having a go here) those in education desperate to improve the rating of their establishment and their own personal success.

Clearly the relevance and use place by business on educational qualifications will vary over time. For entry level roles they "can" be a useful tool to establish some basic points about the candidate and their approach and aptitude for learning. (Accepting of course that there are some who are late developers and some who don't thrive in our current education system). But if basic English and maths skills are important would the alternative be every employer establishing their own basic competency tests - and how efficient would that be? Particularly for SMEs etc?

Clearly there is a wider debate about degrees (and their relative rigour and purpose) but again given that an organisation has decided that it wants to invest in a group of people for its future supervisors and managers then having as a gateway a degree "may" be a sensible way of targeting the "Right" candidates from a far wider pool.

And as a Board member of the CIPD are we to expect that academic qualifications will be soon removed from our offering :-) I somehow think not? Or is this argument only relevant to 16-18 years olds and somehow in latter life they start to have purpose?

The problem I have with these short snappy articles is that its easy to throw up a proposition that seems attractive (you see it on LinkedIn all the time) but its only superficially attractive designed to attract attention.

So educational qualifications are not (and never should have been) the only thing an employer looks at , but for me thats a fairly long way away from saying we ought to disregard them and the effort, hard work and energy that candidates have taken to obtain them.

I do not think there is any ground swell of opinion in business to disregard educational qualifications and I would not hold my breath waiting for one .

Whilst undoubtedly there is a huge amount of pressure placed on candidates especially at 16 and 18 I am not sure there is any real correlation between this pressure and the wishes or desires of business. Most of it now seems to come from (and I am not having a go here) those in education desperate to improve the rating of their establishment and their own personal success.

Clearly the relevance and use place by business on educational qualifications will vary over time. For entry level roles they "can" be a useful tool to establish some basic points about the candidate and their approach and aptitude for learning. (Accepting of course that there are some who are late developers and some who don't thrive in our current education system). But if basic English and maths skills are important would the alternative be every employer establishing their own basic competency tests - and how efficient would that be? Particularly for SMEs etc?

Clearly there is a wider debate about degrees (and their relative rigour and purpose) but again given that an organisation has decided that it wants to invest in a group of people for its future supervisors and managers then having as a gateway a degree "may" be a sensible way of targeting the "Right" candidates from a far wider pool.

And as a Board member of the CIPD are we to expect that academic qualifications will be soon removed from our offering :-) I somehow think not? Or is this argument only relevant to 16-18 years olds and somehow in latter life they start to have purpose?

The problem I have with these short snappy articles is that its easy to throw up a proposition that seems attractive (you see it on LinkedIn all the time) but its only superficially attractive designed to attract attention.

So educational qualifications are not (and never should have been) the only thing an employer looks at , but for me thats a fairly long way away from saying we ought to disregard them and the effort, hard work and energy that candidates have taken to obtain them.

CIPD remove qualifications?! I imagine it's at this very moment trying to engineer a level 2 or 4 or 6 so people can go through more hoops :-)

There was a Level 4 which I previously completed, but is no longer recognised under the current CIPD qualification levels ;-)