The lack of graduate jobs in the UK and the subsequent un- and underemployment of university leavers have been decried for years. New research now reports that over-qualification has reached saturation point, with woeful impacts on the UK economy.

According to a report commissioned by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), more than half the UK’s graduates are wasting their degrees in jobs that do not require a university qualification and are thereby driving lower skilled workers out of their jobs. Furthermore, the authors warn that the money invested in education is wasted, leaving young people crippled by debt as they enter an increasingly competitive labor market. Importantly, the discrepancy between the qualifications and skills of university leavers and those needed by the labor market has severe macroeconomic impacts, as it affects economic competitiveness and growth negatively, increases unemployment, undermines social inclusion, and generates significant economic and social costs.

“The assumption that we will transition to a more productive, higher-value, higher-skilled economy just by increasing the conveyor belt of graduates is proven to be flawed,” said CIPD chief executive Peter Cheese. “Simply increasing the qualification level of individuals going into a job does not typically result in the skill required to do the job being enhanced – in many cases that skills premium, if it exists at all, is simply wasted. This situation is unsustainable given that the government estimates that 45% of university graduates will not earn enough to repay their student loans.”

Indeed, the UK is trailing behind other European countries, leaving only Greece and Estonia with a higher underemployment rate. While countries such as Germany, Switzerland or Slovenia have underemployment rates of around 10%, a staggering 58.8% of students in the UK are not using the qualifications from their degree. The findings of the CIPD are supported by a claim from the Office for National Statistics in 2013 that half of recent graduates in the UK were in non-graduate jobs.

Graduates in non-graduate jobs, 2004 and 2010. The CIPD report noted a rise of underemployment in most European countries. Illustration: European Social Survey

In order to improve the bleak outlooks of graduates, the CIPD suggests raising the profile of alternatives to a degree such as apprenticeships and re-evaluating how employers invest in further training. The report thus applies a Malthusian logic to the issue of over-qualification, arguing that young people should rather pursue alternatives to a university education as the demand for skilled work on the UK labor market is saturated. Indeed countries, such as Switzerland, with a dual education system that fosters apprenticeships and other alternative educations perform significantly better in terms of matching qualifications with labor market demands.

The UK’s poor record is thus only the latest evidence of the skills mismatch and labor market frictions across Europe – a phenomenon investigated in the Nobel Prize winning research of Diamond, Mortensen and Pissarides. On the basis of this research, JANZZ.technology has developed a practical tool to recognize discrepancies between labor market demands and skills supplied by workers. Its solutions thus offer an effective way of gaining the necessary information in order to get better value out of an education system and to increase an economy’s productivity. As the CIPD has recognized, better information about degrees and their prospects might just be the first step to recovery.

 

The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has recently published a study about the most important work skills for the future. Yet, those who expect to find a guideline will be disappointed.

Due to the rapidly changing demands of the labor market, the study has found that foresight and adaptability will be the key to success. The top ten skills for 2020 listed by the IFTF therefore contain abilities like “sense-making”, “transdisciplinarity” or “novel and adaptive thinking” (see graphic below). What sound like the predictions of a horoscope, which will prove true no matter what, is actually symptomatic of the driving forces behind the increasingly automatized and interconnected work force.

Indeed the changing demographic, the rise of smart machines and new media, the progressive globalization and the changing structures of organizations are causing disruptions in the labor market that oblige individuals and organizations to rethink the way they approach career paths. As machines replace humans in an increasing number of tasks, and augment them in others, humans need to find what they are uniquely good at and what makes them indispensable.

While the study might for many parts be preaching to the converted, it is nevertheless interesting to read it as a symptom of the changing attitude towards work. The study reflects the decline of a rigid occupation image that is increasingly substituted by freelancing, working in projects, job sharing and of course a great variety of career opportunities. The key statements of the IFTF anticipating an even more flexible and fluid job market for the future reverberate with the reality as we already know it.

We find ourselves in world of skills rather than jobs. Therefore, finding the right job opportunities for one’s skill set becomes more and more important. As the job platform JANZZ.jobs matches skills with occupations and projects, it is the ideal means to connect individuals with the right work opportunities and to help them reassess the skills they need or discover possible career paths. JANZZ.jobs contains all the skills of the world.

With gender diversity becoming an ever more important feature of tech companies, some employers are at a loss how to attract more women. As the graphic from Gigaom shows, tech companies struggle to attain an equal number of male and female employees, especially in leadership or technical roles. While the Mad Men days of overt discrimination against women might be over, unconscious bias is still affecting employers and job seekers, resulting in dismal diversity numbers. Cutting-edge software has the open mind that employers lack.

According to a study recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, job listings may contain a subtle, unconscious gender bias in the way they are phrased. Even though, these listings do not explicitly exclude women or people of colour, the language in these ads may keep them from even applying. The paper found that this issue was especially prevalent in the engineering and programming industry, as such companies included significantly more “masculine words”. Job listings containing words like “competitive”, “dominant” or “strong” made women less interested in applying – even when they possessed the necessary qualifications. Also phrases like “a proven track record” resulted in more male applicants, whereas “a passion for learning” attracted female job seekers. Unconsciously then, tech companies are upholding the status quo.

As employers find they can’t trust their own objectivity anymore, detecting and preventing unconscious bias has become a growing business. Computer scientist Laura Mather has recently created a computer programme to fight biased hiring decisions. Her start-up Unitive develops software that helps companies detect gender biased formulations and rephrase their job listings in a more gender-neutral way in order to attract more women. Furthermore, the programme has a resume review portion that separates the candidate’s education from their experience in order to circumvent for example a systematic preference for Ivy League schools. Also the job platform JANZZ.jobs offers its users the benefit of gradual anonymity as it does away with the rhetoric customarily found in job descriptions. The platform helps with the formulation of objective requirements and facilitates a largely discrimination-free and transparent application process.

Technologies such as those developed by Unitive and JANZZ.jobs are investments into the future. Mather says “the companies that invest in this now are going to be ahead profit-wise, innovation-wise and they probably aren’t going to have as many lawsuits”.