Page 20 - IDEA Study 10 2015 Skills Mismatches

and does not match your education and work experience?”. This question was mainly aimed at assessing the prevalence of overeducation and/or overskilling (related to job experience, not necessarily to the qualifications obtained in the education system). Nevertheless, it is the best available subjective measure and will be used here keeping its possible limitations in mind. The second type of overeducation measures, usually referred to as empirical measures, is based on the idea that actual educational structure in a narrowly defined type of occupation can give us an idea about what is the appropriate level of education in that occupation and which level of education can be perceived as too high (classified as overeducation). The empirical measure used in this study defines an individual as overeducated if his level of education is higher than the 80th percentile level of education within his or her occupation. This is based on the assumption that workers with higher education than the 80th percentile of education within a given occupation are overeducated. A similar definition of overeducation was used e.g. in Ortiz and Kucel (2008) or Barone and Ortiz (2011). The measure is constructed in the following way: First, I define occupations based on three-digit ISCO classification,9 which allows me to create sufficiently narrow definitions of occupations while keeping the number of observations within each occupation reasonably large. Within each occupational category, I measure the 80th percentile of the levels of education, where the level of education is defined based on nine-level ISCED categories of education levels.10 An individual is then defined as overeducated if his/her level of education is higher than the level of education of the 80th percentile individual. The obvious problem with this type of measure is that if the overall educational achievements of the population increase, certain occupations might be suddenly pursued by mostly tertiary-educated individuals even though lower qualifications would suffice for these occupations. In this way, objective measures using actual education structure might underestimate overeducation (for a discussion of this issue, see Barone and Ortiz, 2011). On the other hand, if the educational structure of population was kept artificially low (as in the communist era in the Czech Republic), the new tertiary-educated graduates after the 9 The International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) is one of the main international classifica- tions of occupations. For details on the ISCO classification, see e.g. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/. 10 The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) has been developed to allowed comparison of educational levels across countries, for details see: http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Pages/international-standard-classification-of-education.aspx. 16