Giving Compass' Take:

• Fast Company discusses the changing landscape of the economy with CEOs and managers to learn their opinion on having practical skills vs. having a college degree.

• If college degrees were no longer a common standard of employment, what methods could lead to more job training and development opportunities?

• Read about how organizations are preparing Americans for the new economy.

When Giancarlo Martinez applied a few years ago to be a web developer at Genome, a d igital marketing firm in New York, he was confident that he had the ability. But he couldn’t help but wonder whether company recruiters would be able to recognize this. The reason: Although he had gone to coding school, Martinez was largely self-taught.

Among the big questions now confronting the U.S. labor market is this: How common will stories like Martinez’s become?

“Getting a job at today’s IBM does not always require a college degree,” the company’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, has asserted. “What matters most is relevant skills.” Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIn, has been pushing the same message at his company.

But others are decidedly cautious, noting that longstanding cultural norms and institutional inertia stand as powerful roadblocks to this new way of thinking. Some experts are particularly skeptical that a skills-oriented approach to learning and hiring can transcend the tech industry.

The situation is evolving—but “not fast enough,” adds Karan Chopra, executive vice president of Opportunity@Work. "A critical mass of employers needs to shift behavior, signaling to the rest and influencing a change in the way the market operates today," she says.

The goal, then, is to make all kinds of courses readily available in physical classrooms and virtual settings alike, allowing folks to acquire know-how that’s useful in the real world and then demonstrate their prowess to employers.

“An increasing number of job seekers face being shut out of middle-skill, middle-class occupations” because of this phenomenon, Burning Glass Technologies, a provider of labor market analytics, warned this month. “This credential inflation . . . is affecting a wide range of jobs from executive assistants to construction supervisors.”

Read more about why practical skills matter by Rick Wartzman at Fast Company.