Trump HR Office Elevates Tech Over Reading Skills For New Hires

Federal agencies should place more weight on job applicants’ technological know-how—and less on traditional metrics like people skills and even reading comprehension—under new guidance from the Trump administration’s human resources office.

The Office of Personnel Management on Tuesday released a blueprint for how agencies should evaluate job candidates, as part of a broader push to prioritize skills over academics. The 60-page document, presented as a roadmap for job-specific competency tests across the government, elevates the importance of attributes such as digital collaboration, technology application, and technical competence, while downgrading qualities such as reading comprehension, interpersonal skills, and teamwork.

The guidance reflects the next phase of President Donald Trump’s effort to overhaul the federal workforce, an institution he has said both fails taxpayers and occasionally thwarts his agenda. Nowhere was this more evident—and scrutinized—than in the Department of Government Efficiency, the opaque office that carried out sweeping, chaotic layoffs at the start of Trump’s second term and employed people with few traditional credentials.

In a Substack post, OPM Director Scott Kupor highlighted Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old college dropout who became widely known by his anatomical online moniker. Coristine got “zero recognition of the fact that Ed was/is a world-class software developer,” Kupor wrote. “Instead, his lack of credentials was dispositive of his ability to do the job for which he was hired.”

“If we want the best talent in the federal government—which I think we do—we should not refuse to hire college dropouts, unless dropping out of college is somehow representative of their ability to work successfully on behalf of the American people,” Kupor wrote.

The new job schedule, called the 2210 series, is the first step in OPM’s effort to update more than 600 classifications, Kupor wrote, focusing on skills rather than college degrees and applicants’ self-assessments. The office aims to reduce the number of classifications by at least 25%.

About 70% of the current workforce has an associate’s degree or attended some college, according to government data. Bachelor’s degree holders have historically been paid more than those without a four-year degree.

Loosening education requirements, in part to create career paths for those who didn’t go to college, has historically received bipartisan support. In 2024, Congress passed the Chance to Compete Act, which instructed agencies to move toward job-knowledge tests, work simulations, and other hands-on assessments.

Implementing such tests is harder, however. They are notoriously expensive and time-consuming to create, former officials say, and prior efforts have struggled without more funding from lawmakers.

OPM’s plan would add 11 new evaluation categories for applicants, including artificial analysis, data management, and encryption.