Is the requirement to have any type of degree or certain amount of years worked discriminatory?

Question

I am mostly curious about qualified candidates that cannot prove their skill, because they cannot get it to the interview.

I'm a developer, but the question is not focused on IT. I've had two cases to be curious about this topic.

One time I got a refusal to attend an interview from a recruiter, because I had 2.5 years' of experience with certain technology, but they searched for somebody with 3+ years. But in my opinion it does not even qualify the skill in that particular field, because one can work on side-project for 4 hours a week for 5 years with that technology: that is far less experience in comparison to somebody, who worked a full-time job, plus a part-time job, plus some courses for 2 years.

Another case is I was refused an interview was because I haven't got a bachelor's degree. But on the other side, I have almost 4 years of employment in industry and chances are my qualification would probably suit the position.

My guess is that some positions require a certain type of degree by law, but is it the case for all positions and does it even happens often?

I'm residing in Ukraine and these were Ukrainian companies, but it is generally interesting about laws for such cases in different countries.

Answer 1

Yes. But it isn't illegal discrimination in many places.

Laws against discrimination prevent the discrimination based on forbidden categories. Take the national Olympic team:

• They are allowed to discriminate based on athletic performance, obviously.
• They are allowed to discriminate based on gender. There are men's teams and women's teams, and men cannot simply apply for a slot on the women's team.
• They are not allowed to discriminate based on sexual orientation.
• Discrimination based on a minimum age might be legal, discrimination based on a maximum age probably not.

For an employer, it is legal in many places to discriminate based on (formal) qualifications, but not to discriminate based on sexual orientation or race. (It may be legal to discriminate based on nationality, however ...)

Answer 2

In the UK, discrimination law works a bit like this:

1. Define things you must generally not discriminate about.
   Examples - peoples sex or gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, disability.
2. Allow exceptions where needed/appropriate, and define how to assess if the exceptions are appropriate (this will be needed to make legal decisions in particular cases).
   Examples - if you operate a Christian church, someone might argue that your religious leader can't be a Muslim. If you run a hostel for abused women, its probably reasonable to argue you need to seek a woman in certain roles. But if you run an authentic Italian restaurant, can you only employ Italians (ethnicity), or is that illegal discrimination and you can limit it to Italian speaking people (a skill anyone can have)?
3. This basically, defines direct discrimination - if you did discriminate against someone, and it was based upon some trait in (1), and the matter doesn't fall into an exception under (2), then its illegal discrimination.
4. However that leaves too much of a loophole for discrimination to happen in other ways. So UK law also defines indirect discrimination as well. If your action has the effect of being disproportionately unfavourable to a group that is protected under (1), then its also considered discriminatory.
   Examples - if you ask employees if they plan to become pregnant, and don't promote those who say yes, pregnancy itself is not a protected trait, but it will disfavour women compared to men, and sex and gender are protected. So your company policy would have a discriminatory effect. The same happens if you require people to not have beards. Some religions will require/expect followers to have a beard as part of their religious practises, and if you don't make exceptions, your rule will affect some people generally but many people of that religion, so it would have a discriminatory effect.
5. Last there are a wide range of tests used by courts, to decide if something discriminates or not. Example - if 2 workers do work of equivalent value/difficulty, but aren't paid equally, that might show discrimination.

Putting these together, here is one current example in the courts.

In this company, shop workers are mostly women and warehouse workers mostly men. Question: if shop workers are paid on average less, is this discriminatory? After all, a man working in the shop gets the same pay as a woman.

But overall more men get the higher pay and more women lower pay.... so if the work is "equal", a UK court would conclude the pay system still discriminated indirectly against women.

Answer 3

Think about it from a typical employer's perspective.

They advertise a position and get hundreds of applications. It would be incredibly expensive to interview every applicant, so they don't. Instead, one of their clerical staff checks each application against a list, and every application that fails in even a single criterion is tossed. The application and résumé aren't actually read, simply scanned for specific details.

If there are too many remaining, more conditions are added and the stack processed again.

Note that at no point was any subjective judgement used. The culling could have been (and perhaps sometimes now is) done by a machine.

Now there are perhaps a few dozen applications left, and those are the ones that will actually be read by a more highly paid employee, who will use their human resources skills and experience to remove the obviously inappropriate applications.

The remaining dozen or so are then passed on to someone in the target department, someone that actually knows something about the specific job, and they further reduce the pile.

Finally, the remaining few are the ones that are granted the very expensive interviews.

Unless the initial criteria are blatantly discriminatory (e.g. no women, no one over 30), or the second and third level culls are made by someone with personal biases (which would become obvious after a while when people notice that all new hires are males under 30), there is no real discrimination.

The final list of candidates is very likely to contain at least one excellent future employee, and that is all that the company cares about. That many other candidates that are just as good were excluded doesn't matter. That a few candidates that were perhaps slightly better were excluded doesn't matter either.

Yes, the conditions are arbitrary (2 years versus 3 years experience), and yes they are unfair (formal versus practical experience), but they are necessary for the process to work.

Answer 4

united-states

In the US, discrimination is prohibited only against a few specifically defined categories of people, known as protected classes. Race, national origin, religion, and to some extant age are protected at the Federal level. Some states, cities, and localities add additional classes, such as sexual orientation. I am not aware of anywhere in the US where educational attainments or work experience forms a protected class.

Thus, in the US, and employer is completely free to require a specific degree, a certain number of years of work experience in a particular area, or both. An employer is not requires to consider is soemn0oen not meeting its required qualifications could in fact do the job well. Many jobs routinely are advertised with such threshold requirements, and people not meeting them are not seriously considered.

Answer 5

In the UK, only medical professionals are required to have a particular degree. Civil engineers (designing buildings) need not have a degree, but plans must be signed off by a structural engineer with the relevant degree. Some other professions do not require a degree but do require some kind of formal training: law, teaching, flying aircraft, sailing larger boats or commercial ships, for a few examples. These are legal requirements in order to carry out that work.

In other professions such as software development, there is no legal requirement to have any particular qualifications. However a degree often teaches theoretical aspects of the work which are very unlikely to be picked up through work experience. Many roles therefore require a relevant degree to be sure that the person has that theoretical knowledge.

Years of experience in some area is a quick way to check whether you are able to apply that knowledge. This normally gives a minimum level of experience for full-time work in that area, as a quick way to screen out people who are obviously not ready to do the work. As you say, someone working in this area part-time may get through this first-level process. It is very likely though that the employer will then read their application and reject them without an interview; and if they get to the interview then they will not get the job. Be grateful that you were screened out at the start, because that means you don't have your time wasted!

Some employers may be happy to accept other types of experience. I spent a few years as a contractor, and my first role was using C++. I had 7 years in industry coding in C, but no industry experience with C++. However I had 2-3 years of experience working with C++ on personal projects, and they were happy to accept that as enough for an interview. I aced the interview, and I got the job. I've also interviewed someone applying for a trainee/apprentice role who had done a relevant course in her own time but was unable to show any qualifications or experience. I suggested that she went away and worked on something like an open-source project to give herself a "show reel" and demonstrate that she really wanted to work in software. Sadly she chose not to, but I would happily have accepted that as an alternative to experience in paid work.

Answer 6

At some point an employer must descriminate, if there are more applicants than positions available. They cannot give the job to everyone who applies.

All else being equal, then number of years experience, or education level is as good as any other way to narrow down the list of candidates.