Page 6 - IDEA Study 10 2015 Skills Mismatches
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The youth unemployment rates in the Czech Republic are persistently low in international comparison, not exceeding 10% among individuals with some upper-secondary education even in times of economic crises. High unemployment rates only concern the small group of young individuals with primary education, who only account for about 5% of the youth nowadays. The fact that massive expansion of tertiary education did not translate into higher unemployment rates provides first evidence that overeducation is not a big issue in the Czech Republic. Compared to EU average, both secondary and tertiary education is highly focused on technical fields, such as engineering and metallurgy, architecture and construction. Secondary education also produces large number of graduates of wholesale and retail, hospitality and restaurant services and textiles production, while tertiary education is highly focused on pedagogy, economics, medicine, and law. Tertiary graduates of these fields of study have one of the lowest unemployment rates, so there does not seem to be an excess supply of graduates of the largest fields. Vertical qualification mismatch, measured by the share of overeducated individuals, is also very low in international comparison. Overall, about one fifth of the Czech population finds themselves subjectively overeducated for their current job, while the objective and empirical indicators define as overeducated only 12 and 8% of the working population, respectively. This study also examines the horizontal qualification mismatch, which refers to the situation when individual’s field of study does not correspond to his/her occupation. The share of horizontally mismatched individuals is relatively high for both individuals with upper-secondary (60.5%) and tertiary (47.1%) education. However, these relatively high shares of mismatch stem from a narrow definition of horizontal match used in this study. Moreover, these numbers are not exceptionally high in international comparison. The shares of both horizontal and vertical mismatches differ substantially across fields of study. The lowest share of mismatches is naturally among graduates of medicine, pharmacy, architecture and construction, law, and pedagogy (highly regulated professions), but also economics, electrotechnics and energetics, engineering, and information technology. However, there seems to be only weak correlation between the share of horizontal mismatches and unemployment rates across fields of study suggesting that the mismatch does not necessarily reflect a suboptimal labor market situation. 2
