Overeducation Among Spanish Graduates. Stepping-Stone or Dead-End?

The purpose of the paper is to determine whether overeducation is a temporary or permanent phenomenon in the working career of Spanish young employees. In other words, the aim to assess if (a) workers accept jobs for which they are over-qualified at the start of their working career as a “stepping stone” to a better one, as the theory of career mobility predicts (Sicherman, 1991). Or if, on the contrary, (b) overeducation are rather a “dead end” for some workers, who hardly get a job appropriate to their qualification. Additionally, I seek to explicitly assess the impact of past overeducation as a hazard when attempting to escape such a situation.

The analyses rely on the Continuous Sample of Working Histories (Muestra Continua de Vidas Laborales, MCVL), a representative sample of the four percent of individuals who at some point in the reference year had dealings with the Spanish Social Security system, selected by simple random sampling.

The main finding is that jobs with low requirements do not act as stepping-stones for Spanish graduates, but rather that these suboptimal posts might delay the transition to a more appropriate job. This is particularly true when the number of episodes in overeducation are numerous and prolonged in time. Looking at the results of the paper in more detail, I firstly show, at a descriptive level, that that graduates who are overeducated for their first job take much longer to access a position appropriate to their formal qualifications. Moreover, a “bad” access in the labour market is also associated with “bad” prospects in a working career: those workers spend more time out of the labour force, have working episodes of shorter duration and experience more involuntary turnover.