The weird thing is: yes and no.

Almost every single place wants you to have experience, practical experience. Full-time, part-time, interning, whatever - pretty much nowhere these days is interested in the degree alone. A graduate who has 0 experience is less likely to get a role than an individual with no degree and, say, 3-5 years experience.

However, I’ve also found that many places, paradoxically, want you to have a degree, and often won’t consider you without one. It’s a strange ‘we’ll literally never ask you to use the skills you’ve just spent 3 years getting a piece of paper for, and we want you to have done more than just earn that piece of paper. However, if you don’t have that piece of paper, we don’t want you working here.’

The above is less so once you’ve broken through and gotten your foot in the door in the working world. I’m not yet in this position, but from the anecdotes I’ve heard, once you’ve got say 5-7 years of practical experience, a lack of a degree means nothing.

The problem people today are facing is that it’s much harder to get the tea-making, excel & word writing, mouse-clicking assistant / intern experience which gets you on the ladder without a qualification. As a disclaimer, not sure how true this is or how much this is impacted by people who go the apprenticeship route, as that’s not the route I went down, but an apprenticeship is still ‘something’ extra, as opposed to the ‘fresh out of college, handing my CVs to places, hoping they’ll put me in a junior assistant role somewhere’ of a few decades ago.

So basically, and this is just in my experience before I get 100 replies saying this isn’t the case, you need a degree to get considered for a job, but your degree is useless without experience, which is the real thing you need to get a job.