April 7, 2025 (press release) –
Taneisha Edwards has an inspiring story. A high-school dropout, she started at Sam’s Club as a part-time cashier juggling work and being a single mother. She was determined not to be a statistic after growing up in foster care and quickly began making moves. She used our education benefit to earn her GED and several skills certificates for free, which helped her get promoted several times and build a better life.
Taneisha is a great example of hard work meeting opportunity – a story that’s not uncommon at Walmart and Sam’s Club. We’re investing in building the skills of our workforce to fill 100,000 in-demand jobs with the company. Our job is helping connect people looking for their first job or a career change to similar opportunities. Doing this means we have to be able to recognize peoples’ unique skills and abilities, regardless of their work history, educational background or lack thereof.
That’s the goal of the Skills-First Workforce Initiative, a project convened by Walmart and launched after our first-ever Opportunity Summit last year. The initiative is being led by Burning Glass Institute through a grant from Walmart and includes a group of other large U.S. employers. This working group – including Accenture, Bank of America, Blackstone, Home Depot, Microsoft, Nordstrom, PepsiCo and Verizon – is developing a groundbreaking framework for skills-first hiring that can fit every business.
A skills-based approach to employment is critical in a country where more than 80 million workers don’t have a college degree. Job openings are outpacing hiring in the U.S. in part because of a decades-long reliance on college degrees as a measuring stick for qualification. To meet the growing needs of the nation’s economy and labor market, a shift to skills-first hiring will be necessary. At Walmart, we’re investing in building the skills of our workforce by removing college degree requirements where possible, investing $1 billion by 2026 in skills-based training and education and creating career pathways to jobs with greater responsibility and higher pay.
But it’ll take a lot more than one company to move the needle. That’s why the Skills-First Workforce Initiative is focused on solving one of the biggest challenges to scaling skills-first hiring across businesses and industries: developing a common language, or taxonomy, for assessing and verifying skills.
Today, the Burning Glass Institute unveiled Skills-First.org, a new website housing skills profiles for nine common jobs, representing over 11 million U.S. workers. Employers can use this to see the top skills for each role, which skills are on the rise, common skills definitions, and proficiency standards (basic, intermediate, advanced).
Consider what this looks like for warehouse managers, for example, who are responsible for overseeing and coordinating the movement, storage and distribution of goods and materials across industries and businesses of all sizes.
The release of this website supports a broader effort to create an open-source, comprehensive framework for skills-based hiring, available to all employers. Using custom-built AI models, we are rapidly expanding to include 30 in-demand roles, encompassing an estimated 40% of U.S. workers. These AI tools will analyze publicly available labor market trends and provide definitions for skills and proficiency levels, among other applications.
We’re also driving wider adoption by working with leading HR tech providers to give specific feedback on how to integrate skills into their platforms used in the private sector. Our goal is to have HR enterprise technology companies incorporate this work into their existing systems to help encourage broader adoption of skills-based hiring across companies of all sizes.
A skills-first approach to hiring is critical to creating workforce opportunities that can drive job mobility, address labor shortages, and grow the economy. We know it will take a system-level approach to create transformative impact. We encourage employers to visit Skills-First.org and learn how you can get involved/put these tools to work in your organization.
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