SPRINGFIELD – Facing difficulties filling vacancies and concerned highly-skilled workers are being overlooked, the city adopted a new ordinance to ensure those without a college degree are not automatically rejected for jobs.
The City Council took a final vote last week to adopt a skills-based ordinance allowing officials in charge of hiring to consider people who do not meet minimum educational standards if they can show they have equivalent experience instead.
“We want to remove the requirement of a minimum of a bachelor’s degree for jobs which might not necessarily need them,” City Councilor Jose Delgado said. “Could their experience be used in place of that?”
