It never rains but it pours. In other words, in spite of the fact that there are few jobs available in Spain, 33% of young graduates who have the opportunity of working after finishing their studies consider that the skills required to do their jobs are below the academic skills acquired. That is to say, they are overqualified. If that were not enough, Spain is at the head of the ranking of European countries with an overqualified population for the jobs available. Although the results in the rest of Europe are not brilliant, over half of the working population, more specifically 59.5% of employees, have jobs that are in line with their training.

These data are taken from the latest report by the Fundación Crecimiento y Desarrollo (Growth and Development Foundation – CYD) titled “The Contribution of Spanish Universities to Development 2014”. The trend is for this discrepancy to continue increasing as long as the number of available jobs is still scarce. Since 2010, this phenomenon has increased by five percentage points. However, the study goes even further and concludes that 6.7% of job offers do not require any type of training. Almost one out of every four initial contracts signed in Spain in 2014 was to work as an accountant, office assistant, waiter, security guard or salesperson.

However, there are large differences within the country: The Canary Islands and Extremadura have the lowest overqualification ratio among young people as they have fewer graduates compared with the Spanish average. On the other extreme, we have Madrid, Valencia and Castilla y León. By specialisation, there are few offers for the wide-ranging employability of engineers, IT experts, mathematicians, physicists, chemists or experts in business management and administration, while the opposite can be said of journalism, architecture or audio-visual systems.