What is Formal Qualification

A sample of 30,379 Spanish university graduates from the class of 2010, surveyed four years after graduation, informed, on the one hand, if their positions needed a university degree and, on the other hand, what was the most appropriate study area for these positions. This chapter identified four situations of educational mismatch: appropriate match, horizontal mismatch, vertical mismatch, and vertical and horizontal mismatch. By estimating a multinomial logistic regression, this chapter categorized university degrees in each of those four categories. A significant percentage of them ended up in jobs that didn't require a university degree. Only graduates in Medicine increased the probability of being well-matched in their first and current jobs. The results also indicated that a considerable percentage of graduates (30%) who were mismatched in their first job became well-matched in their current employment after moving to a different firm.