The scourge of “overqualification”

So – are workers in England more likely to be “overqualified” for the work they are doing than their global peers?

Even in posing the question you know this is going to be an OECD report: in this case the Survey of Adult Skills for 2023. As the name and background suggests, this is a multi-national survey instrument, with a sample size of around 5,000 per country or “sub-national entity” (like England) and response rates hovering around 40 per cent (the target was 70 per cent). This gets England a “medium caution” rating in the non-response bias analysis. There’s literally a whole additional publication detailing the methodological problems faced.

This is before we get to the thorny question of how we identify skills mismatches – it turns out you are “overqualified” for a role based on responses to this question:

If applying today, what would be the usual qualification, if any, that someone would need to get this type of job?

To be clear, this isn’t a matter of looking at qualification mappings, or analysing job advertisements. This is just asking the person you are interviewing what qualification is “usual” to get this “type of job”. And if the qualification someone holds is deemed higher than the qualification named in the answer to this question – they are “overqualified”.

Imagine, say, a hospital lab worker who has taken a job-related part-time masters qualification while working over a number of years. As they started their job via an apprenticeship straight from school, they are now overqualified.

England, Japan, and Israel have the largest proportion of “overqualified” workers. England and Israel are also among those with more workers deemed “overskilled” – an even more nebulous concept.

We get a list of characteristics associated with qualification mismatches:

• Age (younger workers may take time to sort their way into the right roles, older workers will be likely to have spent less time in education)
• Gender and partnership status (women overwhelmingly tend to take on family care responsibilities, limiting the types of work they are able to participate in at certain points in their lives)
• Immigration status (foreign-born and foreign-educated workers are more likely to see their qualification unrecognised)
• Attainment (clearly if you have spent more time in education, you are more likely to be overqualified)
• Firm size (smaller firms are more likely to give workers responsibilities for which they are overmatched in terms of qualifications)
• Contract type (you are more likely to be overqualified if you are on a temporary contract)
• Occupation (if you are in “elementary” work, you are clearly more likely to be overqualified – if you have pretty much any qualifications)

Where things get really odd is if you look at overqualification rates for people in these groups – in England workers with the above characteristics are less likely to be overqualified than pretty much anywhere else (the charts at 4.17 in the report are fascinating). Firm size is the notable exception. All of which prompts the question as to who it is in England that is underskilled – either the issue is in what we might call mainstream employment or there is a survey problem.

The OECD country-specific report for England doesn’t offer much help – it says that even though there is more “overqualification” in England, there is less of a wage gap based on this phenomenon than in most other nations, and no significant impact on life satisfaction.

In summary, there is a small detrimental wage impact from “overqualification” but no other issues worthy of note. And England’s rash of “overqualification” may simply relate to a better qualified workforce or (as little as I want to get behind the current fashion to disparage human resources departments) poor quality recruitment.