34% of workers perform tasks lower than their educational level

In Spain, labor overcurrent has become a persistent phenomenon that affects a good part of the active population. According to Eurostat data, 35% of Spanish workers with a university degree are working on a position that does not require such high qualification, so it is considered underemployed because the labor market is not taking advantage of their knowledge.

On the other hand, most companies do not find qualified talent that it seeks. Some and others so little.

Undume employee record. Each year, thousands of workers with university degrees or higher training are forced to accept jobs that do not require their level of studies. At least that is what follows from the latest data published by Eurostat. According to this data, 34% of workers in Spain occupy a position lower than their educational level, which represents the highest overcover rate of the European Union.

This figure is 13.7 percentage points above the EU average, which is at 20.7%. Behind Spain are Greece (32.3%) and Austria (26.8%), while countries such as Luxembourg (4.3%), Czech Republic (10.6%) and Croatia (12.3%) register the lowest levels of overcover in the EU.

Spanish employees have been supporting this phenomenon for more than a decade that, despite having been slightly reduced in recent years, continues without finding a solution to reduce the gap in the mismatch of talent that exists between the formation of candidates and what companies demand.

women are the most affected. As explained from the EU, the phenomenon of overcover affects both men and women, but in 21 of the 27 countries of the EU, the percentage of overcree women is greater than that of men. Although the gender difference is minimal in Spain: 35.8% of women and 34% of men are overwhelmed.

This trend has been stable for more than a decade and does not respond to causes of gender discrimination, but to a generalized inefficiency of the Spanish labor market and the difficulty for family conciliation, which forces women to accept jobs for those who are overwhelmed, but that allow them to adjust schedules to take care of their children.

Difficulty finding qualified talent. At the same time, the last study ‘2025 talent imbus‘Prepared by the ManpowerGroup employment platform, reveals that three out of four companies have problems finding the profiles it needs. On average, 75% of companies do not find qualified personnel for certain profiles, and in some sectors the figure rises to 84%.

This situation generates a paradox in the labor market: there is an excess of professionals trained for positions that do not exist and, at the same time, there is a huge scarcity of workers for the competences that companies really demand. The result is an unbalanced labor market, where the supply of employees and the demand for talent do not coincide.

The mismatch between training and business demand. The root of this problem is in the mismatch between the training chosen by the students of university careers and the needs of the productive fabric. According to the sixth report of the Observatory of the Labor Market of 2023, prepared by BBVA Research and Fedea, more than 54% of graduates in university careers related to the humanities, arts and social sciences end up being employees overcree in jobs that have nothing to do with their training.

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A very visual example was provided by the analyst Jon González (@jongonzlz), from his X profile, in which he showed a graph of the university careers that less underemployment (jobs that require less qualification) record.

Placing health care races, engineering, computer science and sciences among which the least labor mismatch. On the other hand, the data corroborates that the branches of humanities register the largest number of overcreeing graduates for the employment it develops.

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Image | Unspash (Brooke Cagle)