A total of 3,794,900 employment contracts signed last year, 23.88% of the total, were signed by employees who had a higher level of training than the activity they were supposed to perform, and among young people the percentage rose at 27.41%.
This is clear from the 2021 State Labor Market Report prepared with 2020 data by the State Public Employment Service (SEPE).
23.88% is distributed among people hired for what the SEPE considers basic activities, among which are catering, personal, protection or sales services , among others, but who had a high school or intermediate degree training (12.03%), or with university studies or professional training (6.38%).
The remaining 5.46% corresponds to workers hired to carry out middle positions, among which the SEPE includes technicians, support professionals, accounting or administrative employees and who had university studies or professional training.
In the case of young people, overqualification is even more pronounced . 27.41% of the hires made in 2020 to people under 30 years of age were made to workers with a training level higher than that required for the occupation group.
The trend is similar to the general one, since those young people with baccalaureate or intermediate degree studies added to those who had university studies or a professional training hired for basic activities were 22.02% . Those hired for medium activities with university studies or professional training were 5.38%.
Progress compared to 2019
The general figure also represents a relative advance in the hiring of overqualified workers compared to 2019, since, according to the data for that year, these represented 18.85% of the total hiring , although the absolute figure was higher (4,225 .902) because it was the pre-pandemic situation.
In fact, there were 29.1% fewer contracts registered in 2020, but the drop was especially pronounced among workers with a similar level between their training and their task (-34%) and the under-qualified (-57.4%) . In this case, they went from almost 5.9 million hires in 2019 to 2.5 million in 2020, representing 15.8% of the total compared to 26.28% in the year prior to the pandemic.
Specifically, of that 15.8% of hiring of underqualified workers in 2020, 12.78% corresponded to people with primary or secondary studies who would hold middle positions , such as technicians, support professionals, accounting or administrative employees, among others.
