Your College Degree Says You're Qualified. The Job Posting Says You Need Two Years of Experience First.
Four years in university and the entry-level job still wants you to show up with a resume.
By Maria Garcia
The job posting says entry-level. The requirements say two years of experience. The salary says fresh graduate. The interview asks what you've shipped.
You finished your degree. You did the internships—most of them unpaid. You built the portfolio. You learned the tools they said mattered. And now the same companies that designed those curricula are telling you the degree isn't enough.
This is not a skills gap. This is cost-shifting. Companies spent decades training new hires. Now they expect universities to do it for free, and when universities can't, they expect you to work for free until you prove you can do the job you already studied for.
The two-year experience requirement is a filter, but it's not filtering for competence. It's filtering for who can afford to work unpaid internships, who has family money to cover rent while building a portfolio, who already knows someone inside the company. It's a class barrier dressed up as a meritocracy test.
In Metro Manila, this means fresh graduates are taking six-month unpaid stints at startups that call it "exposure." In Kuala Lumpur, it means degree holders are working part-time retail while sending out applications that go unanswered. In Jakarta, it means moving back in with parents because the jobs that exist don't pay enough to live on, and the jobs that pay require experience you can't get without taking jobs that don't pay.
Employers will say they need people who can contribute from day one. What they mean is they've cut training budgets and onboarding time, and they're passing that cost to you. They'll say the market is competitive. What they mean is they can demand experience because someone desperate enough will say yes.
The degree was supposed to be the entry. Now it's just the minimum to be considered for unpaid trial labor. And when you finally get the job, the salary reflects what they think you're worth as someone who "got lucky," not what the work is worth.
The job market is not broken because young people aren't ready. It's broken because companies stopped investing in making them ready, and decided to call that your problem instead.
