More than 70 million Americans are STARs—workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes who learned on the job, in the military, at community colleges, through bootcamps, or other pathways outside a four-year degree. Yet many are shut out of higher-wage roles by “paper ceiling” requirements that don’t reflect what they can actually do.
Opportunity@Work, a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit, is hoping to change that. By helping employers shift to skills-based practices so STARs can move up, the nonprofit’s goal is to enable upward mobility for 1 million STARs and boost their earnings by $100 billion over the next decade. And the group is doing so with growing traction across the public and private sectors.
“Over the last five years we have seen a real movement take hold, as employers of all shapes, sizes, and industries look to STARs to fill their talent needs,” says Blair Corcoran de Castillo, SVP of Public Sector & Policy. “This movement is one of the few truly bipartisan issues that we’re seeing support on from both sides of the aisle today, and we’re excited for what the future could hold if more employers could tear the paper ceiling and hire STARs.”
McKinsey’s work with Opportunity@Work
CEO and cofounder Byron Auguste, formerly a McKinsey senior partner, launched Opportunity@Work in 2015 to widen pathways to good jobs. The nonprofit and McKinsey began working together in 2019, first by mapping how STARs gain skills in lower-wage jobs that overlap with the capabilities needed in better-paying roles. That research helped make the case for skills-based hiring—evaluating candidates by what they know and can do, not where they learned it.
Since then, the collaboration has expanded on several fronts. McKinsey has supported the award-winning “Tear the Paper Ceiling” campaign, amplifying a national call to consider STARs for open roles and helping align investors and partners. Elsewhere, teams have worked alongside Opportunity@Work to strengthen insights and data; build networks of employers and public leaders; and improve technology and platform services that match STARs to opportunity.
Most recently, the partners co-developed a “Government as Employer Playbook” to help state agencies adopt and sustain skills-based practices at scale. The public sector is a crucial proving ground. It employs more than 15 percent of the U.S. workforce and faces persistent hiring challenges—tight budgets, specialized roles, and complex processes that can unintentionally filter out qualified people. Momentum is building: To date, 31 states have passed legislation or issued executive orders and initiatives removing degree requirements for many roles.
The playbook enables states to:
- Set a vision for skills-based talent,
- Identify interventions across the talent cycle,
- Use change management practices to help promote behavior change and skills-based talent practice adoption across agencies, and
- Identify communication strategies for how states can raise awareness about the shift for STARs, among other efforts.
“State human resource leaders needed a clearly communicated rationale and the supporting tools to launch new, skills-based approaches for hiring,” says McKinsey partner Hamilton Boggs. “Through our partnership with Opportunity@Work, we identified pain points for hiring managers and STARs and identified how SBH practices could support easing the pain on both sides. We then collaborated on change management guidance in a playbook to ensure the change would both stick and scale. Our hope is that the approach outlined in the playbook can support states for years to come.”
STARs across the states
Colorado shows what this looks like on the ground. In 2022, Governor Jared Polis issued an Executive Order to formally transition the state to skills-based hiring. Since then, he has signed three other executive orders to promote work-based learning and apprenticeship opportunities in state government and direct state agencies responsible for K-12, higher education and workforce development to create a seamless pathway between efforts and ensure they are not competing.
In 2024, Opportunity@Work and McKinsey partnered with Colorado’s Department of Personnel and Administration on an eight-week pilot to identify, test, and scale effective practices. The team mapped the STAR applicant journey from application through onboarding and trained HR teams to hire and develop talent based on skills.
The pilot focused on moves any state can make: rewriting job descriptions to highlight required skills; flagging postings that are open to STARs; equipping recruiters and hiring managers to assess skills consistently; and engaging agency leaders through a structured change plan. These changes aimed to make the process clearer for candidates and more efficient for hiring teams, while helping the state fill critical vacancies.
Colorado is seeing results. The state reports a 20 percent increase in skills-based job postings since April 2024, and as of March 2025, 93 percent of postings emphasize skills over degrees, according to the governor. In 2024 alone, Colorado hired more than 1,588 STARs, and the share of STARs among new hires rose from 36 percent in January to 54 percent by December. Those numbers point to a larger shift: when job requirements match the work, qualified people get through the door—and agencies get a stronger, more diverse pipeline.
Utah offers another example. The state removed degree requirements in legislation passed in 2019 and reinforced the change with a 2022 executive order. Even with that policy foundation, leaders saw the need for consistent tools so HR managers, generalists, and agency leaders could apply skills-first practices with confidence. In partnership with Opportunity@Work and McKinsey, Utah launched a pilot to strengthen communications, provide toolkits, and embed processes that help hiring teams apply skills-first practices more effectively. The state also created a Skills-Based Hiring - Hiring Pathways website to showcase on-ramps into public service and share stories of employees thriving in skills-based roles, helping candidates see themselves in government careers.
Together, Colorado and Utah show how policy, practice, and storytelling reinforce one another. Policy sets the direction. Practice turns that direction into day-to-day behaviors—how jobs are written, how skills are evaluated, how new hires are supported. Stories make the change visible, motivating both candidates and hiring teams to try something new.
Opportunity@Work now aims to help more states accelerate this shift through its STARs Public Sector Hub—a place to find data, peer support, and practical resources, including the Government as Employer Playbook and case studies like Colorado’s. The goal is not simply to run pilots, but to make skills-based hiring standard operating procedure: easier to start, easier to sustain, and easier to improve over time.
“More than one-third of all public sector agencies say they can’t find enough skilled candidates. By requiring a bachelor’s degree, they’re shutting out millions of workers who already have the skills to succeed. As skills-based hiring takes root nationwide, STARs will close that gap,” says Paige Bongiorno, Director of the STARs Public Sector Hub, Opportunity@Work. “I know—because I’m one of them.”