Study and you will go far, says the motto. But in Spain the distances seem shorter.
36% of Spanish workers with university education carry out a job for which it is not necessary to have this training. What’s more: we are the country in the European Union with the highest percentage of overqualified workers.
These are data released yesterday by Eurostat, which refer to 2022. But in the entire historical series, which begins in 2013, Spain is always in the lead among European countries in this peculiar category, with which in the last decade it has been unable to to face the problem. A disregard and waste of talent and a great source of frustration. “It’s the usual number… the news is that we’re not improving…”, says UPF professor José GarcÃa Montalvo, who has been studying the subject for years.
The chronic shortcomings in the offer of Vocational Training courses that would make it possible to adjust the supply and demand of the labor market, as well as “a certain endemic titulitis, with more university graduates than some great power”, as pointed out by the general director of LinkedIn in an interview that is published this Sunday in Dinero , are some of the explanations for this imbalance.
According to the latest available report from Esade on the Spanish labor market, of the total job offers published in 2022, only 13% of them required a university degree. This explains, among other reasons, how an aspirant to find a job with a higher degree, given the scarcity of offers, ends up accepting to carry out jobs where less qualification is required.
The vast majority of Infojobs job offers request “basic studies” (some 870,000 vacancies), while those that rise the most compared to the previous year, with an increase of 47%, are those that do not require any study (more than 500,000 offers). .
Experts warn that the greatest risk is that this situation becomes chronic – as the statistics seem to indicate – because the worker ends up giving up looking for the position that corresponds to him.
Many young people also suffer from the opposite problem: a lack of sufficient training. Spain, the OECD country with the highest youth unemployment rate –43.9% unemployed among those under 25 years of age, three times the EU average–, is also the one with the most underqualified young people – almost 30% with no more studies than ESO– and the second behind Greece in ninis, with 22% of young people who neither study nor work compared to 15% in the OECD.
Not so much, not so little.
