Radu Ionescu comes from Dambovitsa. He graduated with a degree in sociology but was unable to find a job right out of college. He said, he is not in a hurry, he can “actively” wait for several months, look for a job. But after six months, he still did not “catch” anything in the field in which he trained. Finally, he got a job as a salesman in a supermarket. Among the colleagues were two engineers and a forester.

Trade and transport are the occupations in which we find the largest surplus of skills. The least in education and health care, according to the results published these days by Eurostat as part of experimental statistics.

At the European level, the situation of those who are overqualified for the jobs they hold is as shown in the graph below:

The skills gap can be both cyclical and structural. During periods of economic growth, when more recruitment is registered, there are significant difficulties in finding the necessary workers, research shows on this topic. A cyclical period of rapid economic growth can lead to skills shortages, while the opposite can happen during a downturn.

As a result of fluctuations in the business cycle, employment standards change, and when demand increases and the labor market is tight, employers are forced to adjust their standards downwards, increasing the number of cases of under-education and under-skilling in an attempt to cope with the difficulty of recruiting a skilled workforce.

Thus, situations where there is high employment growth may also have significant skills shortages as companies operate in a tight labor market.

The skills gap may be limited to certain skill levels. Estimates based on microeconomic data from the EU Labor Force Survey show that there are more jobs requiring medium-level qualifications than people with equivalent qualifications, while the reverse is true for lower-level jobs and workers with low education.

Labor market congestion can occur for different reasons depending on skill level: skill shortages are the driving force behind congestion in high-skilled occupations, while unattractive working conditions play a greater role at lower, low-skilled levels (corresponding to differences in job preferences).