The Diffusion of Qualifications in the Spanish Labour Market

Abstract

Many politicians and employers consider the expansion of higher education in all industrial societies as an efficient way to modernize the economy and to decrease youth unemployment. However, a major part of the scientific debate focuses on skill upgrading versus downgrading of occupations and the relationships with schooling and vocational preparation. Our analysis is a tentative first step towards clarifying this trend and the relationships between educational policy and qualification requirements in Spain. More particularly, our purpose was to attempt to answer a central question is the increase in the number of jobs which require a high level of education sufficient to absorb the increasing education of the labour force, and is there a formal correspondence between changes in occupational structure and educational levels? Results of the methodology devised by several European teams, financed by the European Centre for Development of Vocational Training (CEDEFOP) and applied on the Spanish labour market allows us to provide some information in answer to this question. On the Spanish labour market, statistical results indicate that an occupation‐education‐age structure of an estimated theoretical labour force based on a ‘supply‐side effect’ is more highly correlated with the observed occupation‐education‐age structure in 1990 than an estimated labour force based on a ‘demand‐side effect’. Despite the technological change or the industry rationalisation, the results seem to show a homogeneous propagation of the educational level for each occupation.