As school uniforms are brushed off and new textbooks bought, it’s the time of year when students hope, and parents pray, that all the expense and hard work involved in education is going to pay off at some point in the future.

Parents and guardians and, let’s be honest, especially those of us of African origin, are generally not shy about drumming into our offspring the importance of education, education and – yes – even more education.

So perhaps it’s not the most comforting time to hear from Laszlo Bock, Google’s Vice-President of People, that his company is hiring fewer and fewer graduates. In an interview with The New York Times, Bock revealed that the company’s data analysis had found that there was little correlation between high college test scores and performance within the company.

Bock said: “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s (Grade Point Averages) are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14% of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.”

But is the fact that Google is putting less importance on hiring top college graduates necessarily a bad thing – even for the typical achievement-focused African parent? Surely what it means is that the company is encouraging its applicants to be concerned less with the certificate they emerge with, and more with the skills and qualities they can bring to the table?

In the same way that the company has jettisoned its ridiculous interview questions (think ‘How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane?’), it now seems to be acknowledging that, in today’s workplace, we need to think beyond narrow qualifications – surely something we can all agree on?

The reason Bock believes that an employee’s ability to perform at Google is unrelated to their performance in education is because of the different skills required in school and at work, and because of the personal changes people go through after leaving college or university, and how this changes their views and perceptions. Good school grades, he says, simply mean that you were good at the business of being in school.

“I think academic environments are artificial environments,” he said. “People who succeed there are sort of finely trained; they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment.  One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”

This change of mindset can only come as a relief to candidates selected for interview at Google, previously a nightmare scenario for anyone who had researched the company’s interview process. Questions which Bock frankly admits were designed more to make the interviewer feel smart than to identify real talent, could include brainteasers like ‘How many gas stations are there in Manhattan?’ The answer to which is not only of absolutely no interest to anyone - except possibly a marketing hungry oil company - but, the Google VP admits, is ‘a complete waste of time’.

Instead, he says, what does work more effectively is the use of structured interviews that require candidates to describe their behaviours in certain real-world situations, thus providing more useful insights into their way of reasoning and giving a sense of what they would consider to be difficult.

Google’s evolving view of the importance of higher qualifications and results will probably find some sympathy with Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy Group UK.  According to Sutherland, graduates with a lower second class or third-class degree will make for better, more loyal, employees.

In a column for The Spectator, Sutherland suggests that students focused on achieving top degrees miss out on the other aspects of student life, thereby not acquiring the soft skills needed to succeed in the workplace. “I have asked around, and nobody has any evidence to suggest that, for any given university, recruits with first-class degrees turn into better employees than those with thirds – if anything the correlation operates in reverse,” he says.

He also argues that those with lower grades are no less valuable but, because they are “undervalued by the market”, will be more grateful for the opportunity when hired, and prove to be more loyal recruits.

Before long-suffering parents rise up in outrage at the idea that their hard working, high achieving children are being denied opportunities simply because they’re smart, it’s fair to say that we’ve all, at some time, worked with people who are extremely clever technically, but completely clueless when it comes to putting that cleverness to work. High exam marks can indicate great focus and self-discipline when it comes to studying, but they really don’t tell you that much about a person’s potential for problem solving at work. Indeed, as my own parent often says, “Common sense is not very common”.

The class of degree someone attains is not an automatic indicator of their ability in the workplace and, in fact, can sometimes be misleading.  Comparing results across different degree disciplines or even the same disciplines from different educational establishments is a challenge to any recruiter, leading to inconsistencies and, sometimes, a disproportionate reliance on brand name institutions and convenient stereotypes, rather than individual holistic assessments.

According to Gabrielle Parry, Managing Director of international psychometric assessment business, Saville Consulting, “Although we frequently see the use of degree classification to sift applicants, it is not necessarily a good way of predicting performance. Our assessments of graduates show that key predictors of potential are having a drive to succeed combined with the ability to lead and work through others. If these are missing, then no matter what the degree, they are unlikely to perform well.”

As parents or guardians, while we may bristle at the idea of our offspring’s hard work going to waste; as professionals we all know that, at work, it really isn’t just about the degree. Even leaving aside the many successful business people who managed without completing higher education – Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Simon Cowell, to name but a few - those who succeed in the workplace are not the ones with only academic accolades, but the ones with great communication and team skills and the ability to deliver results and satisfy their customers.

But as you see your freshly-uniformed young ones off to school or back to university, maybe it is too soon to discourage them from aspiring for top marks.  After all, not everyone is going to approach recruiting talent with the same philosophy – or indeed time and financial resources - as Google. For many organisations, it will almost certainly always be about the grade.

But, with an eye to the future, perhaps the lesson for us as parents and guardians is to ensure that our young ones approach education as a means of opening their minds and not narrowing their options, and to help them see higher education as a time to develop not just their intellect, but their self-awareness, attitude, communication and interpersonal skills.

After all, as one of today’s top global brands, it’s a fair bet that where Google leads, others will follow.

Author of 'Everyday Heroes – Learning from the Careers of Successful Black Professionals'. Available online from www.everyday-heroes.co.uk and on order through booksellers. ISBN 978-0-9569175-0-8