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The job market is transforming — from credentials to skills ​

I watched my cousin graduate with honors in 2023. Computer science degree from a good state school. Solid GPA. He spent fourteen months applying to jobs before landing one. Meanwhile, a friend who dropped out sophomore year to build indie games had three offers within a month of deciding to look.

That's not an anomaly anymore. That's the pattern.

The numbers finally caught up to what we've been feeling ​

By 2025, 90% of HR leaders reported hiring outside traditional four-year degrees (Fortune). A quarter of U.S. companies dropped bachelor's requirements entirely (HR Dive). And here's the part that stings if you just finished paying off loans: 94% of employers say skills-based hires outperform those hired on credentials (Forbes).

Verizon now says 99% of their roles don't require a degree. Sergey Brin admitted Google hires "tons" of people without bachelor's degrees. IBM made half their U.S. openings degree-optional through their "New Collar" program.

This isn't companies being charitable. They figured out that degrees weren't predicting who'd actually be good at the job.

Why the old system broke ​

The honest answer? Degrees became a lazy filter.

When you're hiring and you've got 400 applications, requiring a bachelor's degree cuts the pile in half. It doesn't tell you who can actually do the work. It tells you who had the money, the time, and the family stability to sit in classrooms for four years. That correlation with ability was always weaker than we pretended.

And now three things happened at once:

The skills moved too fast. Game engines, AI tools, web frameworks. By the time a curriculum committee approves a course on something, that thing is already outdated. A four-year degree teaches you theory from four years ago. In tech, that's ancient history.

Portfolios became undeniable. Why guess whether someone can code when you can look at their GitHub? Why wonder if they can ship a game when their itch.io page has five finished projects with player reviews?

Companies got desperate. The talent shortage is real. Excluding everyone without a degree means excluding people who might be exactly what you need. Some hiring managers figured this out the hard way, after watching self-taught developers run circles around their credentialed hires.

The game industry saw this coming ​

I think games have been ahead of the curve here, and it's worth understanding why.

Studios never really cared where you went to school. They cared what you shipped. A polished 48-hour jam game tells a hiring manager more than a four-year game design degree ever could. It proves you can finish things under pressure. It proves you made hard decisions about scope. It proves the game is playable, not just theoretical.

If you're trying to break into games in 2026, here's what actually matters (Dice, CombineGR): two or three polished, playable demos. Case studies explaining what you did and why. Evidence that you finish things. Fluency with at least one major engine, shown through real projects.

Hiring managers aren't looking for potential. They're looking for proof.

The uncomfortable part nobody talks about ​

Here's something that frustrated me when I dug into the research.

A Harvard/Burning Glass study found that companies dropping degree requirements often didn't actually hire more non-degreed candidates. The increase was only about 3.5 percentage points (Forbes). The policy changed. The hiring practices lagged.

That means if you're going the non-traditional route, you still have to work harder. The door is more open than it used to be, but you're not walking through on equal footing yet. Your portfolio needs to be undeniable. Your projects need to speak louder than someone else's credential.

It's not fair. But knowing it helps you prepare.

What I'd tell someone starting out right now ​

If you're in school, don't stop. But understand that the degree alone isn't enough anymore. Build things on the side. Do game jams. Get a Google Career Certificate or Unity certification. Treat the degree as one credential among several, not the credential.

If you're not pursuing a degree, you have a different path but not necessarily a harder one. Build aggressively. Ship things. Document everything. Your GitHub, your itch.io page, your personal site. That's your credential now.

Either way, practice explaining your work. Not just what you built, but why you made the choices you made. What you'd do differently. What you learned. Interviewers remember people who can articulate their thinking.

This is bigger than hiring ​

What's happening here isn't just a shift in how companies fill roles. It's a shift in what we collectively value.

For decades, credentials served as a filter. Expensive, time-consuming, but legible. If someone had a degree, you could assume certain things. It was a signal, not a direct measure, but it was good enough.

That signal is breaking now. Technology makes it possible to see what someone can actually do. Remote work proved that outputs matter more than where you sat. AI is making theoretical knowledge less valuable than practical application.

I find this genuinely hopeful, even if the transition is messy. The question used to be "where did you study?" Now it's "what can you build?"

That's a better question.

Sources ​

Related: How to succeed in game jams