An untapped 70 million workers in the U.S. have the ability to work at higher-level jobs but are shut out of the workforce because of the lack of a college degree, according to the keynote speaker at the Greater Des Moines Partnership’s latest event. In Iowa, that number is 175,000.

The Greater Des Moines Partnership hosted its annual Inclusion Summit: Advancing Workforce and Workplaces on Tuesday at the Hilton Des Moines Downtown. 

Papia Debroy, chief impact officer at Opportunity@Work, identified certain workers as STARs, or Skilled Through Alternative Routes. Someone working in retail might have many of the same skills — active listening, speaking, negotiation, critical thinking and service orientation — needed for a sales representative position, which is higher paying. But that retail worker is shut out of the sales representative hiring process because they don’t have a college degree.  

This issue is relevant as Iowa businesses try to fill thousands of open positions. There were 70,000 job openings in May, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. U.S. Chamber of Commerce data shows that for every 100 open jobs in Iowa, there are 88 available workers. 

Debroy said too many employers are holding on to archaic hiring rules, like requiring college degrees when the skills needed for the job could also be acquired through on-the-job experience. Some states are now removing the college degree requirement for many government positions, as worker shortages worsen. From 2022 to 2025, 31 states took action to remove degree requirements from state job openings, she said. 

Of the 362,000 people active in the workforce in the Des Moines area, fewer than half have earned a college degree, she said. 

“There are about 175,000 STARs in the Greater Des Moines workforce,” Debroy said. “These are folks who have gained their skills through military service, through on-the-job training programs. Most commonly, they’re showing up to work every day, getting better at the tasks in front of them, gaining skills that way and bringing them back to work the next day. Today, when we require a degree for a job, we screen out a lot of populations that we actually seek to bring into our workforces, about 50% of our Black, Hispanic, white workforce, as well as our women workforce.”

She said more than 70,000 workers in the region have the skills to perform higher-level work, she said. 

“They have so many more skills to bring to the region, but right now, opportunity and access does not allow those workers to actually bring those skills into our regional labor market. That’s a huge volume of untapped potential,” Debroy said. 

People who work in minimum wage jobs are able to take many of the skills they learn in those positions and use them in “gateway” jobs, which are entry-level positions that can lead to upward mobility. Many of those gateway jobs are now inaccessible to workers without college degrees because degrees are required. 

“The 30 million people in the United States who have skills to make these transitions to significantly higher-wage work are precisely the folks who are not able to access those jobs,” she said.

She shared three steps business leaders can take to create a vision for the region’s future workforce and who is going to have access to jobs and talent pipelines:

• Identifying and tapping into the talent pipelines workers are already using to go from minimum-wage jobs to gateway jobs. 
• Providing workers with skill sets to take on the jobs of the future, such as artificial intelligence skills. 
• Improving the jobs available in the region by increasing pay and workplace environments.

“As employers, there are roles we play to hire, to really promote for skills and understand how we build a skills-based regional labor market,” she said. “As civic leaders, there are some decisions to make about where we invest in training and how we build out original infrastructure to support talent. And as technologists, I think there’s a lot of work to start to design tools and platforms that actually recognize skills and reward them regardless of where they’ve been gained and on what pathways.”

Tomorrow’s workforce 

The Inclusion Summit also included a student panel to talk about their experiences with the Partnership’s Legacy Project: Career Ready Collective. The program takes place over six weeks on Friday afternoons, when area high school students are exposed to local businesses and learn about professional presence and communication, time and stress management, as well as personal finance and goal setting. Students also heard from motivational speakers and attended a college fair. 

Students said the program taught them how to build resumes, as well as improve interview skills and mindset. Blake Newton, a junior at Waukee High School and iJAG participant, said the program helped him change his mindset. 

“I play both basketball and soccer and I’m really into going out and playing sports and all that. But with that, there’s always going to be the losses, there’s the bad games,” he said. “I feel like the biggest thing was, my mindset before Career Ready was, I’d say, poor, honestly, and could be improved. And after, I had learned that there’s always ways to keep it going. There’s always ways to keep pushing forward, even after those losses, those bad games. I feel like I’ve taken that [mindset] into those sports and even into school, where I just continue to try to push through it.”

Grace Etuknwa, a junior at Waukee High School and student in iJAG, said businesses can better connect with students by sharing their stories. 

“What I would say to employers is to just be genuine, to tell them your stories, like what you enjoy about going to work every day,” she said. “What’s your favorite part? Because as teens, I feel like we like to know what we’re getting ourselves into, and by you being genuine and sharing your story, it’ll encourage us to share a story, and through that, we can build that connection.”

Etuknwa added that she pays attention to the businesses involved in the community through volunteering and other projects.