You mean undercertified or overcertified?

No amount of formal education can guarantee whether someone’s genuinely qualified to handle a certain position or not.

According to the study, for those who are overqualified

And mass initiatives (like university degrees) are created fastest for the strongest signals -- the loudest hype -- and thus tends to overproduce new people just as demand dies.

What are your thoughts on how we can help improve this alignment?

Hey pal, indeed, these anomalies occur mainly due to a lack of signals coming from the hiring market itself. Formation initiatives (and even people’s interests) always lag behind what the market is ready to absorb.

I've been talking to the entire market about skill management and I’ve noticed how flawed our methods for visualizing individual skillsets are. It’s impossible to consider upskilling and reskilling this way. When demand arises, the only possible solution is firing and hiring. This alignment will only occur when the demand provides a granular, specific, and clear indication of the skill gap.

Shouldn’t we be aiming for as broad and as deep an educational capability spread as we can possibly manage, regardless of the market?

I can’t imagine it would be good to have 1/5 of adults lacking in these skills even if it did align with some market demand, for example.

Sorry for the delay. The problem is that ‘as broad and as deep’ works if we think in terms of a mass operation, but not for an individual. For an individual, these are competing strategies. I’m not advocating against a broad education, but at the same time, if the job market can’t truly see each person’s skillset, we’ll always have a mismatch.