Penguin books no longer require you to have a degree to work for them

Pride and Apprenticeships

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Penguin Random House, who regularly appear in the top graduate employers rankings, have now decided they don’t want to just employ graduates any more. The publishing company scrapped degree requirements from their recruitment process as they want a range of applicants, not just people who have read the Norton Anthology. The majority of English students dream of working for a big publisher like Penguin, probably because it’s the one everybody’s heard of. Now they’ve removed the degree filter for all of their jobs adverts, job descriptions and recruitment systems.

They’re not the first to try this out something like this. Ernst and Young announced they don’t care what degree you got, while Deloitte aren’t even bothered where you went to uni. Penguin have gone a step further and said they don’t even need you to have a degree. The motivation behind this appears to be to make their company more socially mobile, not just an extension of a third year English seminar.

Here’s the full statement from Neil Morrison, the Group HR director for Penguin Random House:

“We want to attract the best people to help grow and shape the future of our company, regardless of their background – and that means that we need to think and act differently. Simply, if you’re talented and you have potential, we want to hear from you. This is the starting point for our concerted action to make publishing far, far more inclusive than it has been to date. Now, we need to be more visible to talented people across the UK. We believe this is critical to our future: to publish the best books that appeal to readers everywhere, we need to have people from different backgrounds with different perspectives and a workforce that truly reflects today’s society.”