Walmart US CEO talks inflation, self-checkout, and paying six-figures to non-college degree workers

In an exclusive and far-reaching interview with ABC News, John Furner, president and CEO of Walmart U.S., talked about the retail giant’s push to hire more non-college degree workers for high-paying corporate jobs at the company.Currently, 75% of Walmart’s salaried managers began as hourly associates.High-performing Walmart managers at the store’s Supercenters now have the ability to earn more than $400,000 a year, which includes a new stock grant rewards program.

Some of those managers have college degrees, while others do not – it is not required for the job.“While college is great for some, it’s not exactly the right answer for everyone,” Furner told ABC News.This year, Walmart says it has doubled the number of skills certificates it offers to help people move into higher-paying careers within the company, such as software engineers, data scientists, and opticians.Walmart says certificate programs take associates about four months on average to complete, compared to years for a degree.“Let's say you wanted to be a technician and work on HVAC, or if you wanted to be a truck driver, or robot tech, or a pharmacy tech.

We have those programs where you can do that on the job while you're working, and they lead to great careers,” Furner said.In this Nov.24, 2023, file photo, a Walmart store is shown on Black Friday, in Secaucus, New Jersey.Bloomberg via Getty Images, FILEBusinesses are increasingly removing college degree requirements from some job descriptions and shifting to skills-based hiring.

But a recent report from the Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School found that most companies that say they are adopting skills-first hiring are not actually translating that into practice.MORE: Video -- Fewer companies requiring new employees to have a degreeThe report found that Walmart was among the 37% of firms analyzed that, on average, hired 18% more non-degree workers for roles for which they removed the requirement for a college degre...