For decades, a degree from a recognised, if not a renowned, university embodied competence. It was a shorthand for employees to filter out candidates before they actually began evaluating them. In South Asia, where entry to blue-blooded institutes is often determined by geography, caste, family income, and gender, these factors also serve as barriers to entry. Entry to such institutions, which is often determined by cutthroat competitive exams, keeps capable people out as much as it lets qualified people in.
However, this norm is increasingly fraying now. In 2025, 96% of employers in Southeast Asia are now prioritising upskilling over credentials when hiring, compared to 85% globally, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report. According to payroll firm ADP, 90% of employers reported fewer hiring mistakes and 94% claimed that employees hired on the basis of their skills outperformed those hired on the basis of their degree, signalling a shift to a skills-based economy, where one’s skills are poised to eclipse degrees as career currency.
This shift has become an economic necessity for employers. According to a survey by the McKinsey Global Institute, 87% of companies are either facing skill gaps now or pre-empting them within the next five years. With technological change accelerating, largely because of AI, at an unprecedented pace, skill requirements by employers evolve rapidly as well.
A More Useful Gate
The beneficiaries of this recalibration are not evenly distributed, and this unevenness matters. For women across South and Southeast Asia, who were otherwise disproportionately excluded from elite campuses and professional networks, skills-based hiring offered a different kind of credential: one they could acquire on their own terms, at their own pace, and without relocating or taking on debt to study at institutions that were historically unwelcoming.
This pattern is not only visible in data but is amplified by individual trajectories. Dr Hasyiya Karimah Adli grew up in rural Malaysia and built her expertise not through a conventional academic path but through applied technical work. Hasyiya is now the founding dean of the Faculty of Data Science and Computing at the University Malaya Kenatan, a program that is so oversubscribed that 2,000 applicants competed for 90 places in 2024, with hundreds more completing short courses online.
The curriculum is built around Microsoft’s skilling framework, and the cohort draws not only from students with a background in computing but also from those with a business background to apply data analytics to entrepreneurship. The institute is a living embodiment of the skills-first movement: designed to produce employment-ready graduates faster than traditional institutions.
Microsoft’s AI skilling programme for the ASEAN region, which aimed to train 2.5 million people by the end of 2025 with government and community partners, explicitly targeted women as a priority group, recognising that they remain underrepresented in the region’s technology workforce. Google’s Launchpad for Women series drew more than 11,000 women across sales, leadership, finance, and marketing roles who built cloud and AI credentials outside any formal academic setting.Â
The Democratisation Argument
The broader case for skills-first hiring rests on a straightforward claim: meritocracy functions better when the idea of merit is more accessible. The degree from a prestigious institution measures, among other things, whether someone had the social and financial capital to attend that institution, which is not the same as competence.
Take the instance of Malaysia. The country produces 300,000 graduates annually but creates only 50,000 high-skilled positions, with the Malaysian Employers Federation estimating that 70% of graduates end up in roles that do not require their degrees.Â
The credential has become decoupled from the job. Meanwhile, coding bootcamps across the Asia-Pacific region recorded more than 38,000 enrolments in 2023, with India alone accounting for over 18,000, a 22% increase from the prior year. Women and non-binary individuals now make up 35% of bootcamp cohorts, up from 27% in 2021. That pipeline is feeding directly into companies like Infosys, Shopee, and Grab, which have begun hiring bootcamp graduates at scale.
Competence as Currency
What these caveats make clear is that the architecture of opportunity is shifting. Digital credentials, self-directed technical training, and employer-led skilling programmes have created pathways that did not exist a generation ago: pathways that are, by design or by effect, less dependent on the social capital that traditional pedigree requires. For women navigating hierarchies that have historically made access expensive and uncertain, that shift is the point.
The question now is whether organisations that claim to hire on merit will build the processes that make that claim true.
