Education is the key to fixing the Global skills mismatch.

Job mismatching has become a growing problem in recent years due to a changing market, covid, and other developments. To understand the issue BCG explained that job mismatching is when someone's hired and is either over or under qualified for the position. I feel as if that description is misleading when it comes to actually understanding what job mismatching means. Being overqualified for a particular job doesn't mean that a person is too good for that job instead means that your skillset doesn't match the needs of that job description and the individual would be better fit to do some other kind of work. An example of over-qualification would exist if a person was hired for a sales or marketing position but, had a journalism degree and/or experience. This misplacement of people in the workforce loses the U.S economy $8 trillion in GDP yearly. According to BCG, job mismatching starts with unemployment being high because people are more likely to settle for a job that they aren’t well matched to do. High unemployment hit the U.S at the beginning of COVID which has almost tripled from 2019 moving up from 3.6% to 13.0%. The shift in the market prioritized jobs such as delivery drivers while completely destroying jobs such as retail workers, hotels, restaurants, and fast food. Many overly qualified people settled for jobs in completely different industries than what they were trained or educated to do. Recognizing the problems that the pandemic and over-qualification created has been integral at putting the economy back on track. BCG has analyzed this problem and created a Future Skills Architect tool to gauge the skills mismatch in every country’s labor supply to understand its root causes, and identify the policy measures that can erase the mismatch by promoting re-skilling and lifelong learning among workers. I highly recommend that you take a look.