Abstract: We use the concept of variable degeneracy of a hypergraph in order to unify the seemingly remote problems of determining the point partition numbers and the list chromatic number of hypergraphs. Our hypergraphs may have multiple edges, but no loops. Given a hypergraph $G$ and a sequence $f = (f_1, f_2, \dots , f_p)$ of $p \ge 1$ vertex functions $f_i : V(G) → \mathbb N_0$ such that $f_1(v) + f_2(v) + · · · + f_p(v) \ge d_G(v)$ for all $v \in V(G)$, we want to find a sequence $(G_1, G_2, \dots , G_p)$ of vertex disjoint induced subhypergraphs containing all vertices of $G$ such that each hypergraph G_i is strictly $f_i$-degenerate, that is, for every non-empty subhypergraph $G' \subseteq G_i$ there is a vertex $v \in V (G')$ such that $d_{G'}(v) < f_i(v)$. The main result says that such a sequence of hypergraphs exists if and only if $(G, f)$ is not a so-called hard pair. Hard pairs form a recursively defined family of configurations, obtained from three basic types of configurations by the operation of merging a vertex. For simple graphs this result was obtained by O. Borodin, A. V. Kostochka, and B. Toft in 2000. As a simple consequence of our result we obtain a Brooks-type result for the list chromatic number of digraphs due to A. Harautyunyan and B. Mohar. In a digraph coloring the aim is to color the vertices of a directed graph $D$ such that each color class induces an acyclic digraph of $D$, that is, a directed graph not containing any directed cycle. This coloring concept was introduced by V. Neumann-Lara in the 1980s.