Page 29 - IDEA Study 10 2015 Skills Mismatches

Share of horizontally mismatched individuals among individuals aged 18-55 who are in formal employment is relatively high for both secondary and tertiary educated. For secondary educated, 60.5% of all employed individuals are horizontally mismatched, i.e. their occupation does not correspond to the field of education they have, while for tertiary educated the share is 47.1%. Although it is quite difficult to find comparable estimates for other countries, these numbers does not seem to be exceptionally high in international comparison.15 Compared to previous findings for the Czech Republic, our results report substantially higher share of horizontally mismatched individuals. Doležalová (2014) reports that share of horizontally mismatched individuals is only 34% among secondary- educated in the Czech Republic. However, Doleželová (2014) uses a different mismatch definition (individuals working in occupation which do not correspond at all to their field of study are defined as mismatched), while this study uses a definition of mismatch, which is much broader (individuals not working in occupation which are exactly matched to their field of study). If we use more similar definitions of horizontal mismatch, our finding are actually pretty close to previous literature.16 However, there is a large heterogeneity in horizontal mismatch occurrence across different fields of education. Table 5 reports the shares of horizontally mismatched individuals by their main field of education. Among secondary educated, the share of horizontal mismatch varies from 22 to 80% in different fields. Not surprisingly, most graduates of medical schools indeed work as doctors or other medical staff, and most graduates of pedagogy work as teachers. Relatively low level of horizontal mismatch is also among graduates of banking, insurance and accountancy (43.8%), architecture and construction (48.4%), and wholesale and retail (51.7%). The highest share of horizontal mismatch is among graduates of food and textiles production (around 75%), agriculture, and electronics and automatization (around 80% of horizontal mismatches). 15 Selected studies on horizontal mismatch report that the share of horizontally mismatched individuals is 32% of tertiary educated individuals in Sweden (Nordin et al. 2010), 37% of university graduates in Australia (Mahuteau et al. 2014), and 63% of college graduates in South Korea (Kim et al. 2012). 16 Doleželová (2014) finds the share of secondary-educated workers who work in occupations which are exactly matched to their field of study to be 41% in the Czech Republic in 2013. Therefore, the share of those who are mismatched according to the definition used in this study would be 59%, which is very close to the 60.5% of horizontally mismatched individuals found here. 25