A New Kind of Tech Job Emphasizes Skills, Not a College Degree<br />As the United States struggles with how to match good jobs to the two-thirds of adults who do not have a four-year college degree, his experience<br />shows how a worker’s skills can be emphasized over traditional hiring filters like college degrees, work history and personal references.<br />The TechHire program, she said, could be “a doorway to a good-paying job, which is everything here.”<br />Ms. Clark made it through online screening tests and an interview and got into the program.<br />“We desperately need to revive a second route to the middle class for people without four-year college degrees, as manufacturing once was,”<br />said Robert Reich, a labor secretary in the Clinton administration who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.<br />“That’s what I needed.”<br />Mr. Bridges represents a new but promising category in the American labor market: people working in so-called new-collar or middle-skill jobs.<br />The program’s career coaches also emphasized the so-called soft skills of speaking concisely, working cooperatively<br />and attending industry and professional gatherings to meet people, Mr. Gallegos said.
