To think people are overeducated in the UK?

Highly educated people can still be very thick.

Labour has fucked the jobs market? Labour that has been in power for like a year and a half?

You'd still need training and I've just recently done an Msc in AI and Data Science. You come out the other side still being undereducated for what employers want and underprepared for the insane requirements at interviews. I am really struggling to find anything related which I could actually do. Everything is so intimidating. Fortunately, I was paid to do it but I still took on more student loans. My student loans are now at 86k.

I think this is a small minority of people. Generally, on a day to day basis I am astounded at how bloody thick most people are.

But which ones are they? No one wants to say because they probably aren’t

I hate to bring up the subject but a fair amount of those good middling jobs went with Brexit too - some really good scientific ones, NGCOs , and some manufacturing ones . basically companies who decided it made more sense due to logistics , staffing and copyrights etc to be based elsewhere. When uni education was being heavily touted it was a different world to some extent, in the EU, AI not around, earlier uptake of the internet , ecommerce, websites, apps etc . Unfortunately I think it’s put us at a very disadvantageous position - we go to the Netherlands a fair bit and as part of investigating an EU operation for ourselves the amount of help, information, ( all in English) investor links , start up financing for certain things , excellent scientific and tech hubs and a general ‘can do’ attitude, it has to be seen. Yes it’s a packed area and all well connected and wouldn’t be for everyone as it’s high tax, decent services, but as someone in business albeit small one, you can totally see why for a lot of business it makes more sense. Hence I think the UK without significant change ( and that’s not Farage)will be very much a place of some high earners that do well out of a business , a lot of public servants and a lot of low earners and a fair amount of tradespeople - and not so much ‘in the middle’ for those well educated people who aren’t CEOs but don’t want to be a plumber etc. I certainly don’t think people are over educated, hence they genuinely believe Farage and Trump type stuff- but given the situation here I do think students would be wise to think ‘do I really need a degree to get into xyz ‘ could I get in as an admin apprentice or work my way up from the shop floor etc! I’m all for education for educations sake but not ending up with £60k of debt in an uncertain work world.

More likely that she is being passed over for equally qualified, but less experienced applicants that companies can pay lower salaries to, I think.

You are conflating education and training - others on the thread (and in life) have confused what they are for too. Degrees aren't worthless because they don’t prepare you for a specific job. They aren’t wasted if you end up working in an unrelated field. It’s perfectly valid to study something you have a passion for to a high level even if it doesn’t equip you for a specific job. What it does is increase your ability to learn, to focus, to engage with people you wouldn’t have otherwise met. It shows the level to which you can be educated - and therefore your aptitude for workplace training if that’s required.
My DD did a degree in English and Education (not a teaching qualification) she works in a role as safeguarding lead for a national sports charity. The degree didn’t teach her any of the actual work - it gave her the skills to learn and the empathy to get 9n with her colleagues.

Well I can tell you why I personally do a low skilled (and low paid) job despite being highly educated.
I went to university, graduated with a first class LLB in Law. Decided not to go into law, got a place on a prestigious graduate training scheme instead. Worked my way up, earned a very high salary. Had 2 children, kept working after mat leave. Had a third, he’s disabled. Absolutely no wrap around or school holiday care exists for him. Nada. So I left my career and now work in a low stress, low skilled job where I can arrange my shifts around my family circumstances. I’m sorry if there’s an 18 year old who would like my job.

This has nothing to do with over educating and everything to do with job shortages, only going to get worse as AI automates a lot of roles previously occupied by humans. The answer to this isn't to stop people being educated to a high level, that would not change the number of people competing for jobs!

There's either enough jobs or there isn't. The jobs there are will go to the best (not necessary the most) qualified applicants for the role and the fewer the jobs the higher the competition.

Applicants fresh out of school with no skills or experience have always had it hard.

Lidl has always been competitive because they pay well.

It's a numbers game- if he applies for enough roles eventually one will come up.

Anyone with a PhD in pure maths or statistics ought to be able segue into a six figure salary in data science / deep learning in the current climate!

Hell yes to Chinese discipline and determination - East Asians in general and also India. Over-education is a very English concept.

turns out four of the staff there have masters degrees or above (one has a PhD). Apparently this is a common thing people are doing now as they cant get jobs in their fields

But what are those fields? Corporations created entire departments dedicated essentially to fashions in then-burgeoning schools of sociology. Those fashions are now no longer mainstream and so those departments are being axed.

The more we use AI the less stable the job market becomes.

I have done two very difficult degrees.

my first degree is in economics from cambridge

i also have another degree in maths from the open university.

if they didn’t charge so much these days I’d do another one in music.

when my kids were young I worked part time asa teaching assistant in my local primary school because one of my kids has autism and adhd and appropriate childcare was a fucking nightmare to find.

as she settled and we worked out ways of getting stuff done I went into teaching and taught maths in a state school for 15 years.

was I educated beyond the needs of a TA job? Obviously.

but many mums of children need or want to step back while their kids are young. many like me then step back once they are older.

She's probably trying to pay her bills until she secures another suitable job in her field.

That's a massive part of the problem. Figures published a few days ago showed very high levels of young unemployment and other figures showed the lowest number of graduate vacancies on record.

Who'd have thought that increasing employers NIC and reducing the starting threshold AND increasing minimum wage for youngsters AND increasing employment rights for new employees would have put off employers from hiring untrained/untested/inexperienced youngsters who'd have to be paid the same as older/experienced ones with work history???

It will depend on your industry! I’m not talking about hard technical skills but in my experience of my organisation, there are lots of people highly educated, who I am sure are experts in their chosen academic field but lack basic time management skills including failing to respond to emails, turning up to meetings late or not turning up at all with no apologies, failing to complete work by deadlines but don’t communicate blockers to team members who they have dependencies with, all of which might be perfectly fine when you’re working independently, but not so much when you’re part of a multidisciplinary team. My degree had no team elements and was a highly solo endeavour so I can imagine others are too - I’m seeing more and more people start the workplace without collaboration and communication skills.

I work in project management so my job often involves distilling complex information from a range of stakeholders into a handful of slides, to present to senior colleagues to make a decision in a condensed timeframe. Increasingly, there are colleagues starting the work place that don’t want to give presentations and don’t feel comfortable doing so or haven’t any experience of doing so but they still want that specific position. My degree forced us to do these elements in seminars, being comfortable articulating arguments and defending them in front of peers which perhaps is not true of more recent grads of the COVID generation where a lot of teaching moved online.

I guess what I’m saying is - being able to research and write a fantastic academic paper is absolutely a key skill that can be used in some workplaces - but it’s only one small part of what makes someone successful and I wonder if the way university degrees are set up now means some of the emphasis on softer skills to supplement academic knowledge are not as refined.

I doubt whether an applicant for an entry-level job at Lidl would be advantaged by having an MSc or PhD - in fact the opposite as they would know it is just a temporary stop-gap and the person will be moving on as soon as possible.

So your DS is 18 and chasing a management job? I'm glad Lidl are choosing people with life experience and not kids straight from school. How many 18yr olds truely have the people skills to lead and motivate employees who probably have many years experience and now a lot more about the job than the actual manager

Since when is education a bad thing!? I guess if you ache for a right wing govt whose wet dream is uneducated people who will vote for them so they can screw working and middle class people, you have a point.

Education is a massive problem in this country. It's polarised - so many people with degrees that are not being used in the workplace, and at the other end, ever increasing numbers of people barely literate and numerate and completely incapable of working to any reasonable standard.

We've just not moved on with the entire education system as the World around us has changed. Schools still teach the same subjects as they did 50 years ago when they should have moved to "skills" based teaching rather than subject/memory based. We scrapped the "technical" education system of Polytechnics and turned them into Unis, often providing substandard education or workplace-useless degrees. Colleges are all about literacy and numeracy to school leavers who left school without GCSEs. Adult education has been completely scrapped. And of course, there's barely any trades training - just token gestures from schools still teaching wooden fish and colleges who can't get teachers so their "trades" pupils are often spending most time doing admin/paperwork side of things rather than hands-on training. Many schools still aren't teaching computing to any decent level yet it's clearly the future.

What an absolute mess! No forethought at all over the decades.

I think you’ll find that’s because Labour has utterly fucked the jobs market. I’d say UK doesn’t educate children to compete with other European countries, so no I don’t think we’re over qualified. We are currently a very low growth economy.