Overqualified?

I ended up on PM – the BBC’s flagship 5pm news show last week, chatting to Evan Davis about a report that showed that British workers are more likely than most to be overqualified for the job they do.

There’s important questions here about the quality of jobs that are being created as we go through this period of automation and technologisation.

Being overqualified for the role you’re being paid for – if you’re lucky enough to get a job at all – can suggest that the degree you spent thousands on wasn’t fit for purpose… which is what the producer on the show was trying to nudge me towards.

But I disagree. A degree shouldn’t be about vocational training, not necessarily. It should be about developing wider skills, and having a chance to think about what your ‘ministry’ in life is going to be. This monastic language is retained in English – we ‘go up’ to university, and then ‘come down’ from this many-storeyed mountain when we graduate.

The argument I wanted to make was that we should be aiming for better jobs, not reducing people’s qualifications so that they’re a better fit for a worse role. But this is a highly interconnected issue taking in investment flows and the whole innovation ecosystem at the national and regional level. It’s what I spend quite a bit of my day thinking about.

Being in a job you don’t match well with is – research shows – not good for you, so if we are having higher rates of poor matches that’s not great for our national health either. But the answer has to be better quality jobs… and that’s going to take some proactive work itself by business leaders, firms… but also government, making sure that there are good regional flows of venture capital and R&D investment.

Anyway, apparently I didn’t make a total fool of myself 🙂