What employers say they will use to assess skills, and where the degree sits

Do employers value work experience more than a degree?

The World Economic Forum put out its Future of Jobs Report 2025 in January that year, and page 62 of it carries Figure 4.12. The question it puts to employers is narrower than the one you are asking. It asks which mechanisms they will prioritise for assessing skills when they hire between 2025 and 2030.

Evaluation of work experience came back at 81%. Then pre-employment tests on 48%, a university degree on 43%, psychometric profiling on 34%, apprenticeships on 17%, short courses and online certificates on 14%, and outsourcing to staffing or recruitment firms on 12%. Four per cent said they do not assess skills at all.

The discussion on page 61 says work experience "continues to be the most common assessment mechanism in hiring processes", and puts 81% of businesses on keeping that reliance through the period. Employers could pick more than one mechanism, so the shares do not add to a hundred.

So the figure ranks mechanisms, not candidates. Nobody in the survey was asked to choose between a person with experience and a person with a degree, and what it records is stated intent over five years rather than what a screening tool did with your application last week.

Who was asked, and what the figure does not show

The Future of Jobs Survey ran in late 2024 and gathered more than 1,000 global employers, who between them employ over 14.1 million workers, spread across 22 industry clusters in 55 economies. The report came out in January 2025. Averaged out, these employers run more than 14,000 workers each, and they were answering a survey about intent.

Three things follow from that. The figure records what employers say they will prioritise, not what any individual recruiter does. It is a global average, and the report publishes separate economy profiles because those averages hide wide variation. And it is not Indian data, so anyone writing that "Indian recruiters rank work experience at 81%" has added a word the survey did not.

What the figure does settle is the order inside its own list. Nothing there outranks experience, the degree sits at 43%, and short courses and online certificates sit at 14%.

Where does a university degree sit in the same list?

Third, at 43%. Fewer than half of the surveyed employers expect to require completion of a university degree as a way of assessing skills by 2030. The report reads this as a shift: set against the previous edition, it finds employers "increasingly focusing on work experience and psychometric testing over traditional credentials like university degrees".

Page 61 of the same report pulls in the other direction. It cites O*NET's database of job experience requirements, which shows 14 of the 15 fastest-growing jobs over 2025 to 2030 primarily requiring a university degree, and seven of the 15 largest-growing roles demanding an advanced degree. That finding is O*NET's, quoted by the Forum, and not a result of the Forum's own employer survey.

For an Indian undergraduate the practical reading is that the degree gets you into the queue and the experience moves you up it, and you need both of them.

Does an online certificate count as work experience?

No. The survey lists them as separate mechanisms, and employers put them at 81% against 14%. A certificate records that you completed a course. Work experience, in the sense the survey uses it, means an arrangement in which someone outside your college gave you a task, expected it by a date and could say afterwards whether you did it.

The UGC draws the same line in its Curriculum and Credit Framework for Undergraduate Programmes. That framework defines an internship as a course in which you take part in "a professional activity or work experience" run by a body outside your institution, normally supervised by an expert from that body. The outside body and the supervision are the load-bearing parts of that definition.

The certificate question deserves its own page, and the guide to what an internship certificate is worth to a recruiter takes it apart properly.

What do employers look for in freshers, in their own words?

The NACE Job Outlook 2025 asked employers to name the attributes they want to see on a new graduate's resume. Problem-solving skills led at 88.3%, teamwork at 81.0%. Written communication came next on 77.1%, then initiative on 73.7%, work ethic and technical skills on 73.2% each, and verbal communication on 69.3%. Creativity sat near the bottom at 19.0%.

Notice what those attributes have in common. Not one of them can be demonstrated by a document. They are claims that need an example attached, and an internship is the cheapest way an undergraduate gets examples.

The same survey puts 64.8% of responding employers on skills-based hiring practices, applied most at the interview stage (89.7%) and at screening (67.5%). Competency-based job descriptions were the most common single practice, at 73.7%.

Do Indian employers work the same way?

Not on this evidence. None of the surveys opened for this guide publishes an equivalent ranking for Indian employers, so the 81% should not be moved onto an Indian letterhead.

What India publishes is the supply side. The India Skills Report 2024 is Wheebox's eleventh edition, built with partners that the report lists as AICTE, the Confederation of Indian Industry, the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, Taggd, the Association of Indian Universities, Google and others. Its headline number comes from the Wheebox National Employability Test: 3.88 lakh people sat it, and 51.25% scored 60% or above, the mark the report treats as employable.

Its demand side comes from a hiring intent survey of 152 corporations across more than 15 industries. For 2024 that survey forecast fresher hiring rising by about 22% on average across industries, with demand for freshers holding at 49% for BE and B.Tech graduates and rising from 15% to 18% for BA, BCA, BBA, B.Com and B.Sc graduates.

A sample of 152 companies is small, and the report does not ask them to rank assessment mechanisms. It also appears annually, so these are the 2024 edition's figures and not the current ones. Treat them as a picture of hiring volume in that year.

Should I do a course or an internship?

If you have neither, do the internship first, because it is the thing the survey ranks highest and the harder of the two to arrange later. A course is available all year; a host organisation that will supervise you is not. If your target job has a named technical gate, say a language or a tool that appears in every listing you want, the course is not optional and you do both.

The Indian degree has already made part of this choice for you. Under the UGC framework a summer internship is worth 2 to 4 credits, counted within the 120-credit minimum for a three-year undergraduate degree, or the 160 credits of the four-year honours route. Each internship credit stands for two hours of engagement a week. Exit after two semesters and the UG Certificate requires a work-based learning or internship term worth 4 credits.

Before you commit weeks to either, it is worth being clear about how long a stint has to run before it reads as experience, and about what a remote internship builds and what it does not.

What counts as work experience if nobody has hired you?

Anything where an organisation outside your college set you a task and could vouch for the result. That covers a paid internship, an unpaid one, a part-time job, freelance work with an invoice, a live project for a real client run through your department, and a role in a student body where you owned a budget or an event rather than attending it.

What it does not cover is a course project with no external user, a workshop, or a webinar series. Payment has nothing to do with the test. The test is whether a named person outside your family can confirm what you produced.

So get the supervisor's name, designation and working email at the start rather than at the end. And write down what you actually did in the week you did it, because six months later you will remember the topic and forget the number. Application forms come back to this list years afterwards, and the UPSC Detailed Application Form and the years it makes you account for shows how specific those questions get.

Does this mean marks stop mattering?

No, and the trend is going the other way in the one survey here that tracks it. NACE's chart of American employers who screen candidates by grade point average runs from 2017. The share fell from 73.3% in 2019 to 37.0% in 2023, then rose to 38.3% in 2024 and 46.4% in the 2025 recruiting year. Screening by marks is less common than it was, and it has been climbing back.

Degree subject behaves similarly. In the same survey, 23.2% of employers hire only from majors exclusive to their industry, 50.8% hire from those majors and from others outside them, and 24.3% will take any major at all, whatever its relation to their industry. Roughly a quarter of employers are open to any stream, on that one survey of United States respondents.

Your marks decide which queues you are allowed to stand in, and what you can describe having done decides much of the rest. If you are worried that your college's name is doing the filtering, the data on college tier and employability is a better place to argue that out than a comment section.

How do I turn one internship into an answer about experience?

Write the line as task, action, result, verifier. A recruiter reading four hundred applications is looking for something specific enough to ask a follow-up question about, and "worked on social media" gives them nothing to ask. "Ran the weekly subscriber mailer for eight weeks, list of 1,400, wrote the copy and the subject lines" gives them four.

That format matches how the surveyed employers say they run the process. Among those using skills-based hiring, NACE reports that 73.7% put competency-based job descriptions in writing and 52.6% use interview rubrics. A rubric scores an example against a named competency, so an answer with no example in it leaves the interviewer nothing to score.

Keep the raw material as you go: dates you started and finished, the name of what you worked on, the number attached to it, and the name and email of whoever reviewed your work. Three lines a week in a notes app is usually enough to reconstruct a resume line you can defend in the room.

Quoting these figures without overstating them

Cite the document, the year and the population. "The Future of Jobs Report 2025 surveyed over 1,000 employers across 55 economies, and 81% said they will assess work experience" is accurate. "81% of recruiters prefer experience to degrees" is not, because the survey never asked employers to choose between the two.

In an interview, the number is almost useless and the example is everything. An employer who already believes experience matters does not need the citation. They need to hear what you owned, what changed because of it, and who can confirm it.

There is one more use for the figure. When a listing asks for a fee in exchange for a certificate, put the price next to that 14% and the arithmetic of what you are buying gets simple. The guide on the two competencies employers call most important, and the gap they report in graduates covers what to spend those weeks building instead.