Education and Jobs: Exploring the Gaps (review)

This collection is a sequel to The Education-Jobs Gap: Underemployment or Economic Democracy (1999) by D.W. Livingstone which has become something of a modern classic in the field of work, as it relates to the issue of education and skills matching. Consequently, this volume is most welcome as it brings a wealth of valuable updated and new insights and evidence on the linkage among education, skills, and learning, and actual job requirements for the labour force of the 21st century.

The volume is edited by Livingstone, who is the lead on the Education-Jobs Requirement Matching (ejrm) Project based out of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (oise) at the University of Toronto; seven other members of the research project team have also contributed chapters to the collection. This research is part of a long-term study on the problem of skill and knowledge underutilization in the workforce. The volume is concerned, in particular, with "the education-based dimensions of the underemployment of those who do have jobs," (1) but it also goes well beyond this in exploring the more informal side of lifelong on-the-job learning. In its near 400 pages the book offers an extensive critical literature review along with original Canadian-centred research derived from surveys and ethnographic studies. For those who might find the size of the volume a little overwhelming, the opening and final chapters offer very useful overviews of the main threads of the research.

This work provides a valuable counterweight to uncritical human capital proponents and boosters of the so-called value-added jobs revolution created for 'the age of information and the knowledge economy.' In a period when requirements for literacy and computer fluency are ubiquitous, when the levels of schooling among the general population continue to increase (and outpace actual job requirements), and when so many jobs, particularly in the burgeoning service sector of the economy, have been subject to downgrading through flexibilization of the workforce, the linkage between jobs and skills/education has become an ever more pressing question for critical evidence-based examination. This volume provides just such a timely analysis.

One of the values of the study, which yields many fruitful insights and findings, comes from its use of a mixed methods approach involving linked surveys and case studies for its analysis. The researchers employed a Canada-wide survey of working adults, plus a focused survey of waged and salaried workers from Ontario (each conducted in 2004), along with non-random semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted in 2005-2006 of employed individuals to uncover the deeper meanings of the questions posed in the larger-scale representative surveys. The ability to match findings from empirically-based surveys with insights from detailed qualitative interviews is important. The case study interviews allow access to deeper understanding of the raw numbers, enabling the identification of key themes and providing grounded real life experiences to help shape the analysis. The use of quotations from interviews in the case studies gives actual voice to how workplace learning takes place and how underemployment is actually experienced.

The volume uncovers evidence that points to an ever-growing incidence of worker over-qualification for jobs. Its five case studies, which look at teachers, computer programmers, clerical workers, auto workers, and disabled workers, allow for in-depth examination of the relationship between qualification and jobs. The book reveals that while over-qualification is common, there are important occupational distinctions with respect to the mismatch between jobs and qualifications. For example, teachers have the highest levels of matching between formal educational attainment and job requirements, while clerical workers, for whom formal educational requirements for entry are generally low, have the highest levels of mismatching and underemployment. Significantly, the study gives workers with disabilities special attention, revealing how these workers are particularly disadvantaged and vulnerable in a workforce that has become increasingly polarized between 'good' and 'bad' jobs and subject to high levels of job insecurity.

It is also important to recognize that...