While degree-level education is not a prerequisite for a career in market research, many organisations in the industry have historically predominantly recruited graduates.

Chairing the webinar yesterday ( 1^st July), independent research consultant Zoë McQuillin highlighted the results of the Who do we think we are? report, published by MRS in 2024. She said: “Our industry remains heavily middle class at 67% and we have 19% from private school backgrounds.

“Traditional academic credentials heavily gatekeep the sector – 81% of the sector have a degree compared with 37% in the general population.”

Andy Crysell, formerly founder of Crowd DNA prior to its sale to Strat7 Group, has been vocal in raising the issue of mandatory degrees in industry job adverts by highlighting them in LinkedIn posts and writing about it in the media.

Speaking during the event, he said: “There are way too many job specs out there where a degree was written in as mandatory. This is not falling foul of discrimination law, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s creating a bias: it’s biased against those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, those from minoritised communities. Beyond that though, there are reasons – there are people who, for mental health reasons, may not have been able to go to university. There are lots of reasons why people might not have been able to go to university, and it feels unfair that they are penalised in this sense.

“If you’re going to tell someone that can’t apply for a role unless they have a degree, I think you have to state the case for why that is so, and I don’t think that is what happens in market research.”

Crysell has flagged around 40 job adverts to date, and said of those, about half of the employers had responded to him to indicate that they will consider reviewing their hiring practices.

There is a “false binary” that degree-educated individuals will be inherently more prepared for a career in the sector than those without, who will need more training, said Crysell. “Training is important for everyone, and everyone has different training needs, so I don’t see importance in dividing [people] into with or without degrees.”

Rowena Hay, founder of Shortwork, which specialises in participatory action research to address social issues, and co-founder of the Mighty Mini Research Collective, said she advocates for working with community researchers who bring lived experience of the topic or place being researched.

Hay said: “It can be really hard to reach people as an external researcher, and even to understand who the groups are that we should be speaking to. Community researchers are invested in the topic and want to make positive change, so it means you have a highly motivated team.”

This approach also enables her to bring in a diverse range of skills. “It enables people to come through with the skills we’re looking for without the blocker of having to have done an internship or having a degree that they couldn’t afford.”

Hay began her career as a community researcher herself before going to university, working in research for the civil service and later establishing her own practice eight years ago. She also noted: “The one thing that really prepared me for being a qualitative researcher was working in retail – so I didn’t need a degree for that.”

Almost one million people aged 16-24 in the UK are not in education, employment or training, the recent Milburn review found. For those who go to university, around 20% of women and 30% of men can expect to be financially worse off, according to estimates from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).  

Annie Auerbach, co-founder of Starling Strategy, discussed the the findings of Starling’s ongoing research series with Tapestry Research, The Rift, which this year focused on the gulf between young people and the future.

The study found that optimism about the future decreases sharply at age 16, with 16-24 year-olds far more likely to feel scared for their future than those aged 12-15. Cultural reference points about the future have also become more negative. Auerbach said: “We don’t have a positive image of the future – even in pop songs, most of them are focused on the present or are nostalgic.”

This is against a broader backdrop of traditional markers of progress stalling for younger generations. “The idea of generational progress has been dismantled,” said Auerbach. With narratives about AI causing a ‘jobpocalypse’ hitting headlines, Auerbach said: “If that’s the bigger story swirling around, the more concrete story for young people is the broken social contract – that promise that if you invest in hard work, that translates into a good degree, and then a good job. House prices are rising and wages are stagnating.”

This puts institutions, particularly universities, in the spotlight, added Auerbach. “There are questions about whether university is worth it – will it be a bridge to a better future? Traditional institutions are now not a guarantee to a better future, so how can we not rely on this old social contract and think about better pathways for young people, so we’re not failing them?”

The research also found that young people felt more optimistic about their personal futures (while being pessimistic more broadly). While they felt less hopeful about the role of traditional institutions, they were more hopeful about their own ability to create a life for themselves – with Starling using the term ‘DIY futures’.

This creativity and passion should be taken seriously by the market research sector, according to Auerbach. She said: “Our industry was built on a world where a degree was a really reliable sign of capability, and I don’t think that’s the case anymore. These young people are developing their own capabilities, skills and passions – that’s the stuff that market is really interested in. They’re involved in their communities, learning skills and using new platforms. We should be taking that seriously and translating that into job ads that really look for that vibrant set of capabilities that young people are bringing to the party.”

While accessing a broader, more diverse range of talent is a bigger task than simply removing mandatory degrees for applicants, Crysell said that if market research businesses want to “over-index on being creative”, then “you have to have different perspectives in the room”. He believed that this created “competitive advantage” for Crowd DNA, which didn't make degrees mandatory.

Now is a particularly pressing time to get this right, said Crysell: “Young people are just not going to uni quite so much. The industry is really future-proofing itself if it can wean itself off focusing just on degree-level education. Also, AI risks bringing in a sea of sameness, so it seems like a very good time to double down on the range of people you are bringing in to your business.”