Opinion: Competency-based hiring is wise, and state lawmakers are helping the cause

Elizabeth New (Hovde) explores how Washington state is advancing competency-based hiring practices, reducing barriers for job seekers.

Elizabeth New (Hovde) explains why state lawmakers are right to advance work requirements that make sense

Elizabeth New (Hovde)
Washington Policy Center

If you can get past the preamble, the “equity” language throughout and some of the creation and implementation of toolkits, reporting and anti-bias training, Executive Order 24-04, “Increasing employment opportunities in Washington state government,” is valuable to the state and to Washington state workers.

In today’s economy, along with the high cost of college and changing social attitudes about a degree’s value in some fields, employers are increasingly questioning the need to require job applicants to hold a traditional four-year degree.

As I wrote last year, state hiring should be based on the skills and abilities needed for a position, without automatically excluding those who don’t hold a college degree. As the Harvard Business School put it, “Jobs do not require four-year degrees. Employers do.”

Washington state should not be one of the employers with a misguided barrier to employment. Many different routes to growing one’s work qualifications, including on-the-job training and advancement, apprenticeships, internships, vocational training and life experiences, deserve consideration by an employer, and a college education is not always the way to acquire skills that are pertinent to a state job.

Gov. Jay Inslee seems to be on board with that idea and is among a growing number of governors, both Republican and Democrat, doing something to open up their state workforces to skilled applicants who have previously been dismissed in recruitment. Adding Executive Order 24-04 on top of state legislation that requires change in the direction of skills-based hiring should help the effort to update the state’s hiring practices.

His order says that “Washington state strives to be a leader in the movement towards equity and justice, and we are committed to demonstrating our progress in measurable ways, starting within our own state agencies which employ more than 50,000 people in service to nearly eight million residents.” Inslee’s order continues by outlining ways in which state agencies will move toward competency-based hiring, which includes removing “degrees as the only way to meet a required qualification unless the degree is required by law to perform the essential functions of the job. Instead, agencies must either offer at least one other alternative way to meet that qualification (e.g., years of related experience) or list competency-based requirements.” A legislative action also required this in 2024.

Inslee’s latest order goes further than the legislation by “discouraging both arbitrary degree requirements and experiential requirements that could act as degree requirements in practice.” Executive Order 24-04 “orders state recruiters to prioritize an applicant’s professional body of work over their homework,” the governor’s office writes.

State lawmakers are right to advance work requirements that make sense. This executive order is welcome news.

Elizabeth New (Hovde) is a policy analyst and the director of the Centers for Health Care and Worker Rights at the Washington Policy Center. She is a Clark County resident.

Elizabeth New (Hovde) explains why state lawmakers are right to advance work requirements that make sense

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