Higher education massification and the changing graduate labour market in the Spanish retail banking industry: a case study

ABSTRACT

The expansion of higher education in Spain has not been accompanied by a similar shift in labour market demand for graduate skills. This mismatch between education supply and labour market demand has accentuated policy concerns that without a parallel shift in the occupational structure, higher education massification is leading to an increased share of graduates occupying positions that traditionally did not require university qualifications. It is unclear, however, whether in occupying traditionally non-graduate jobs, graduate skills are underutilised, particularly given changing skill requirements in the knowledge economy. This research uses the case study approach to investigate changes in educational and skill requirements for entry-level jobs in Spanish retail banks. The case study provides a potentially valuable framework for exploring the causes for changes in job content at the sectoral level that are more difficult to explore using quantitative methods alone. This paper draws on 33 in-depth interviews with senior managers and young bank employees, conducted in 5 leading banks in Spain between January 2015 and March 2016. The study argues that even though automation has reduced the demand for routine clerical tasks in retail banks, interviews with university graduates and employers suggest graduate skills are underutilised in entry-level jobs.

KEYWORDS:

• Overeducation
• overskilling
• labour market mismatch
• recruitment
• retail banking
• automation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. 25–34 year-olds.

2. 55–64 year-olds.

3. 44.5% among youth in 2017, compared to 27.2% among the older cohort.

4. Family background has sometimes itself been used as an instrumental variable for education or to control for natural ability (Card, 1999).

5. Premier banking and SMEs.

6. Affluent client managers and enterprise managers.

7. Becario.

8. Using the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED).

9. Bank teller and commercial manager (see Table 2).

10. The ISCO-08 description of the tasks associated with financial associate professionals, including credit and loan officers, for example, encompass interviewing applicants, analysing loan applications, making recommendations and even taking decisions on loan applications ‘within authorised limits’ (ILO, 2012, p. 197).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ghia Osseiran

Ghia Osseiran conducted this research as part of her DPhil thesis at the University of Oxford.