Job requirements and workers' learning: formal gaps, informal closure, systemic limits

Abstract

There is substantial evidence that formal educational attainments increasingly exceed the educational job requirements of the employed labour force in many advanced market economies – a phenomenon variously termed ‘underemployment’, ‘underutilisation’, or ‘overqualification’. Conversely, both experiential learning and workplace case studies suggest that workers continually negotiate such ‘gaps’. This paper summarises results of recent national labour force surveys and workplace case studies in Canada to further assess the relations between workers and their jobs. Underemployment is found to be increasing among all types of employees. Underemployment is found to decline with work experience but persists in virtually all categories of employees – most notably service and industrial working classes and among non‐white immigrant workers. Case studies of teachers, computer programmers, clerical workers, autoworkers and disabled workers demonstrate how underemployed workers as well as others engage in continual learning and try to reshape their jobs. Implications of these findings are identified in terms of the incompatibility of narrow economic market objectives with wider social objectives of democratic education, and of the systemic limits of appeals for still greater formal educational efforts by already highly educated and continually learning labour forces.

Keywords:

• job requirements
• workers' learning
• education–job match
• underemployment
• workplace reforms

Notes

1. The EJRM project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (project no. 501‐2001‐0141). Funding was provided between 2002 and 2007. The SSHRC also funded the collaborative research network on Work and Lifelong Learning (WALL) during this period (project no. 512‐2002‐1011). This combined funding permitted the conduct in 2004 of both the WALL national survey of work and learning and the subsequent more focused EJRM Ontario survey. The Institute for Social Research at York University administered both of these surveys. For extensive material from this network, which included national surveys of both the general adult population and public school teachers as well as a dozen related case studies of relations between paid and unpaid work and various aspects of adult learning, see Livingstone, Mirchandani, and Sawchuk (2008), the special issue on work and lifelong learning by the Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education (2007) as well as the network website: http://www.wallnetwork.ca.

2. It should be noted that the question on educational entry requirements differed slightly between these two surveys: 1983 CCS – ‘What level of formal schooling is now normally required for people who do your type of work?’; 2004 WALL – ‘What general education is required for new applicants or for people who want to do the type of job you do?’

3. Unfortunately, the 1983 CCS Survey contained no questions on further education. Trend analyses of further education must depend on government‐sponsored national surveys for data prior to 1998.

4. For a fuller account of the findings of the 1998 NALL and 2004 WALL Surveys with regard to informal learning, see Livingstone (1999b, 2002, 2007).

5. For a detailed account of the class positions distinguished in Table 2, see Livingstone and Mangan (1996).

6. For the relative significance of multivariate relationships of independent variables with the dependent education–job matching variables, odds ratios are used. For explanation and illustrations, see Katz (2006).