The DEI Issue No One Is Talking About
You can do everything else right, but if your DEI initiative doesn’t also address this one thing…well, you’re doing it wrong.
Spend any time job hunting and you’re likely to see one requirement pop up over and over again, mocking you like the dog from Duck Hunt. Sometimes its pinned to the top of the job description, sometimes it’s buried at the bottom in the small text, but it’s usually there. Finding a job listing without it is incredibly rare these days, and the competition for those kinds of jobs is extremely tough. And, for a specific subset of the American workforce, seeing these few words listed in a job description can be one of the most disheartening aspects of searching for their next opportunity.
Those words?
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in software engineering, computer science or related field
“But wait,” you might say, “don’t you want people who are qualified for the job to apply?”
Of course I do. I think everyone does. But the mistake here is conflating education with qualification: graduating from a four-year college program in any discipline doesn’t make you qualified to then go practice that discipline, it simply means you took some classes and have some [mostly] theoretical…
