“The federal government will no longer be narrowly focused on where you went to school,” Trump said.

Job applicants in the US will now be vetted based on the job skills they possess instead of college they went to earn the degree, according to the latest order signed by the American President Donald Trump. The move will do away with the existing practices in the government’s hiring process based on the college degree instead of prioritizing the skills the applicant may have and deem fit for the job available. “The federal government will no longer be narrowly focused on where you went to school, but the skills and the talents that you bring to the job,” Trump said at the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board Meeting on Friday.

The federal government is the biggest employer in the US with 2.1 million civilians working. According to White House aides, as reported by New York Post, the new ruling would remove the employment barriers with a staggering 47 million Americans filing jobless claims since the start of the Covid pandemic.

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Ivanka Trump, senior advisor and co-chair of the Advisory Board said that the board will launch a “massive advertising campaign that directs those that need to reskill, learn a new trade, to secure a job to the resources to enable them to do that.” Along with this, a series of pilot programmes is being created to “create the resumes of the future and allow people to find job vacancies based on skill — and for employers to connect with those unemployed workers, again, based on skill,” Ivanka said.

However, college degrees wouldn’t become irrelevant altogether but skills in jobs where having a degree is not much important will be stressed as per the latest directive. This will implemented by the office of Michael Regas — the acting chief of the Office of Personnel Management. Regas said, as cited by New York Post, “Those without a degree are at a major disadvantage in the federal hiring process. While education credentials are critical in many lines of work, such as the medical and legal field, this is far less clear in other areas.”