London, May 2023
Six months ago, almost no one outside a research lab had heard of generative AI. Today it is the fastest-adopted consumer technology ever recorded, and it has detonated a question universities, employers, and students are all scrambling to answer at once: in a labour market being rewritten in real time, what is a qualification actually worth?
The early evidence points in one direction. Across the US, UK, and beyond, employers are quietly retiring the degree as a hiring filter and replacing it with a harder test — can you demonstrate the skill, right now, on a real problem? The result is a widening gap between what the education system rewards and what the world of work values. According to Ewance, a challenge-based learning platform where students solve real-world challenges tied to their field of study, that gap is no longer a slow-moving trend. AI has turned it into the defining workforce story of 2023.
The fastest technology shock in living memory
The speed is the story. ChatGPT reached an estimated 100 million monthly active users in January 2023 — just two months after launch — making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS analysis. TikTok took roughly nine months to reach the same milestone; Instagram, two and a half years.
The labour-market implications arrived almost as quickly. In March 2023, Goldman Sachs estimated that generative AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to some degree of automation, with roughly two-thirds of occupations in the US and Europe affected to at least some extent — even as the same technology could lift global GDP by as much as 7% over time.
What changed in 2023 isn't that skills matter more than degrees — that was already true. What changed is the clock. AI compressed years of disruption into months, and a static qualification can't keep pace with a job that's being redrawn while you're still in it.
— Ewance's founder
Why is a degree no longer a forecast?
The clearest data came in May 2023 from the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2023. Businesses surveyed predicted that 44% of workers' core skills would be disrupted by 2027 — up from the 35% companies forecast when the report first ran. The shelf life of what a student learns is visibly shrinking.
The training response is not keeping up: the same report found six in ten workers will require training before 2027, but only half are seen to have access to adequate training today. Employers know the bill is coming due — 82% said they plan to invest in learning and on-the-job training.
A degree certifies what someone knew on a fixed syllabus, on a fixed day. When nearly half of core skills are set to churn inside five years, that certificate is a snapshot of a moving target.
— Ewance's founder
The skills employers suddenly can't find
If grades are a fading signal, what are employers hunting for? The Future of Jobs Report 2023 named analytical thinking, creative thinking, and AI and big data among the most in-demand skills toward 2027 — analytical thinking alone accounting, on average, for 9.1% of the core skills companies reported. These are capabilities you demonstrate, not credentials you collect.
The shortage is acute: 60% of companies identified skills gaps in the local labour market as a key barrier to transforming their business, and 53% cited an inability to attract the talent they need. The problem isn't a shortage of graduates. It's a shortage of proven skill.
Is the degree filter quietly collapsing?
Faced with that shortage, employers had already begun dismantling the bachelor's-degree requirement. In February 2022, the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School's Project on Managing the Future of Work found in The Emerging Degree Reset that employers had stripped degree requirements from roles across the economy, projecting an additional 1.4 million jobs could open to workers without degrees over five years.
Government followed. Maryland dropped the four-year degree requirement for most state roles in March 2022; Colorado followed in April 2022 and Utah in December 2022. In January 2023, Pennsylvania eliminated the bachelor's-degree requirement for roughly 65,000 state jobs by executive order, directing agencies to weigh experience over educational attainment.
When state governments and major employers start deleting the degree box from the application, that's not a fringe experiment anymore. It's a signal to every student and parent that the rules of the game have quietly been rewritten.
— Ewance's founder
Proof is becoming the new pedigree
If the degree is no longer the gatekeeper, something has to take its place — increasingly, direct evidence of ability. A survey of 1,688 HR professionals by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found 56% of employers use pre-employment skills assessments, and 79% say those scores are just as important as, or more important than, a degree or years of experience. TestGorilla’s 2022 report found 76% of companies were already using some form of skills-based hiring.
Employers are not abandoning standards. They are replacing an inherited proxy — the degree — with a direct measure of whether a candidate can do the work.
The market is moving from pedigree to proof. Recruiters want to see the work, verify it, and trust it — not infer competence from the name on a diploma. The students who thrive will be the ones who can show, not just tell.
— Ewance's founder
So what fills the gap a degree leaves?
If the degree is fading as a signal, the gap it leaves has to be filled by something employers can trust — and closing it is why Ewance was built. Launched in 2023, Ewance is still early and deliberately hands-on: it runs challenge-based projects with university students, working alongside the educators who teach them and the recruiters who hire them, to test how applied work on real problems builds the skills the market suddenly demands.
Its read on 2023 comes from experience, not a press-cuttings file. Ewance's founder has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of education and industry, and the platform's conviction was formed in the room — with students, with the educators who teach them, and with the recruiters who ultimately judge their work.
The gap keeps showing up in one place — students rarely get to do the work before they’re expected to have already done it. 2023 made that impossible to ignore: AI raised the bar on applied skill overnight, and a transcript doesn’t speak to it. Students learn most, and prove most, by doing.
— Ewance's founder
What it means for students, graduates, and the people who advise them
For a generation raised to believe top grades were the surest route to a good job, the implications are unsettling but clear. The qualification still matters — it opens doors and signals discipline — but on its own it is no longer a guarantee of employability in a market where skills churn every few years and AI raises the bar on what counts as human value-add.
Recommendations
Ewance's founder offered the following guidance for students and graduates navigating the shift:
- Build proof, not just transcripts. A record of real problems solved is becoming as persuasive as a grade-point average — often more so.
- Treat skills as perishable. With nearly half of core skills set to change by 2027, the habit of continuous learning matters more than any single credential.
- Lean into what AI doesn't replace. Analytical thinking, creative thinking, and the judgment to apply AI tools well are precisely the skills employers say they cannot find.
- Make your ability verifiable. A skill an employer can independently check is worth more than one they have to take on faith.
- Start before graduation. The widening gap rewards those who accumulate demonstrable experience early, not those who wait for a first job to begin.
The headlines frame AI as the thing that's going to take the jobs. The more useful reading is that AI has made one thing non-negotiable: in 2023, you are what you can demonstrably do. That's a challenge for the education system — and an opportunity for any student willing to prove it.
— Ewance's founder
Sources
This release synthesises publicly available research published on or before May 2023.
- UBS — analysis of ChatGPT reaching ~100M monthly active users by January 2023, the fastest-growing consumer app on record (2023).
- Goldman Sachs — "The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth" (March 2023): ~300M full-time jobs exposed to automation; up to 7% potential lift to global GDP.
- World Economic Forum — Future of Jobs Report 2023 (May 2023): 44% of core skills disrupted by 2027; six in ten workers need training; analytical thinking, creative thinking and AI & big data among the most in-demand skills; 60% cite skills gaps as a transformation barrier.
- Burning Glass Institute & Harvard Business School — "The Emerging Degree Reset" (February 2022): degree requirements removed across occupations; ~1.4M jobs projected to open to non-degree workers over five years.
- US state degree-requirement reforms — Maryland (March 2022), Colorado (April 2022), Utah (December 2022), Pennsylvania executive order (~65,000 roles, January 2023).
- Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) — survey of 1,688 HR professionals (February 2022): 56% use pre-employment skills assessments; 79% rate them as important as or more important than degrees/experience.
- TestGorilla — State of Skills-Based Hiring 2022: 76% of companies using some form of skills-based hiring.
