To think people are overeducated in the UK?

[Watdidusay]

I am raging about this too be honest and I'm not sure why.

One of the mums at the school apparently lost her corporate job 8 months ago. Found this out today when I ran into her in Lidl in the next town - she was working as a manager there.
We ended up talking later in the day and 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
AIBU to think we are completely over educating people in this country now?

Feeling angry I think as DS (18) tried so hard over the summer to get a job like this but am finding out now they are all being taken up by people with lots of degrees!

But educated in what?

Having a degree in Renewable Energy Engineering or AI will probably give rise to more opportunities than choosing a degree in Performing Arts where jobs are rare and there is over supply of graduates.

Choosing the right skills is key.

There needs to be a balance of unskilled / skilled / academically qualified people in order for everything to work.

If the OP really wants her 18 year old to be a success in life and to have guaranteed employment then she needs to be encouraging him to study for a trade eg plumbing, electrical work, carpentry. A good trades person will always find work and a smart one will make a fortune.

We made a very silly mistake telling everyone they need to go to university.

Almost all jobs do not require a degree. It's a total con.

OP, it's a tight jobs market so the right skills, for any role, are important.

Good customer service skills, well turned out, polite, friendly, able to diffuse tense situations. The employer will always go for the best person they can find for the money.

My ds17 has a part time job, he trained as a pool lifeguard at 16 because he knew the local pools and health clubs struggle to find qualified staff. He was employed over the other applicant because he was younger and therefor.£2.45 an hour less expensive.

It's tough out there. Every tiny advantage matters.

Christ. Where's the source for this @ThiagoJones ?

Have you heard the way people speak nowadays? They are most not over-educated, lol.

I think the reverse. Too many people in the UK are under educated

It could be a reflection of those particular people and the job market in academia. There is a big difference between Phds and Masters degrees. You can do a Masters degree in a year and many are taught courses. It's just like another year of university. A PhD is years of independent research, study and writing.

People who do PhDs often want to go into academia but there are few jobs and the pay is so poor its becoming a preserve of the wealthy or those with a second income or partner who can support them.

So you get these middle class kids of lawyers and bankers who fund them to do their Ivory Tower phd in pointless subjects like the social implications of the architecture of a long demolished prison. They get their PhD and think they are going to be the next Professor Yaffle-Plum of Oxford University - but they can't get a job, mummy and daddy assumed they would get a job so stop funding them and reality bites so they go off to train to be a solicitor or a shop steward or something boring and conventional that actually pays an income - having wasted a lot of time and othere people's money doing a PhD that is valueless both to themselves and the wider pool of human knowledge.

I am more concerned by the sheer amount of young people who can't read, write or talk properly, across many town in the UK. Many of these are ex industrial/mill towns, where thousands of people never travel beyond their local supermarket.

I would say we are suffering a definite lack of cultural education, including how to cook or identify 'food', whilst the tabloid press is urging it's less educated readership to push sentiments of anti-intellectualism even further.

So no, I don't feel that the UK is overeducated, lol.
It is also incredibly immobile and unproductive. Get out of the cities and financial centres and take a look at the growing illiteracy levels in all areas of the UK (and there was me thinking you all lived in thatched rural enclaves with 10 local butchers ..)

It is far from everyone going to university though, 35% of people go on to further education.

I agree - we are complacent. Which is fine when you're only competing against your own countrymen, but when the game board is global...we lose.

… maybe on paper.

I don't know if this is still the case, but Lidl used to pay their staff considerably more than other supermarkets. They also tend to retain their staff for long periods. They are unlikely to hire a teenager looking for a summer job.

The job market is tough at the moment. My work recently advertised a part-time job paying c. £24K pa pro rata, and we had multiple applicants with post graduate degrees including a Phd. It's a nice place to work despite the pay, but you don't need that level of education to work here.

There are still some jobs that have quite a high turnover - Tesco delivery pickers are always recruiting locally. But they will still prefer to employ someone with a track record of employment and who potentially will stay for longer.

Definitely not. There are far too many nowhere near educated enough as they didn't or couldn't, for whatever reason, engage in education at a secondary school level.

Some people are pushed to get a degree just because it is the done thing for intelligent people, without the degree actually leading to any specific employment. Some of these people are now in jobs that they would have had without the degree and a now getting less in their pocket each month than their colleagues on the same wage as they are paying through the nose for degrees they didn't need. But that's not your issue here.

Your example shows there are just not enough higher level jobs available now, and I fear this situation is going to get worse.

This woman was more likely hired for her experience in higher management level roles rather than for her phd/masters. Your DS at 18 will have not gained a high enough understanding and experience to be suitable for this role, even if he started at 16 there, that is 2 years max experience working in the store. Just because it is a supermarket, doesn't make it any less of an important role, it needs to be run professionally by someone with the correct skill set

I don't think we are overeducated. I think we are educated in the wrong things. We have a lot of skills shortages in the UK, e.g., network engineering/architecture, cloud engineering, cyber security, etc.

The landscape for employment is changing faster than our education and employment infrastructure can keep up with. We should be limiting the number of people training/studying for oversaturated sectors and encouraging more people into the sectors we are underskilled in.

Its too easy for employers and institutions to hire people from abroad and sponsor them. They want to do this because the type of person who migrates to a global capital like London tends to be the most motivated, talented and ambitious of their home population. Some of that motivation can stem from having known abject poverty and perceiving a uk middle class lifestyle as relatively more wealthy/comfortable than a local brit sees it as. People also tend to work very hard when they know their visa depends on their job. Its a known issue and causes brain drain from poorer countries.

We need highly skilled people and we do create jobs for them, unfortunately skilled migrants then out compete brits for them. Look at the NHS, where a lot of training posts are going to overseas applicants who've already qualified elsewhere.

The government tends not to want to limit this migration because a) it keeps wages down and b) the productivity of these highly skilled, motivated young migrants tends to enrich those at the top and drive economic growth.

Anti-intellectualism is so dangerous. Children read less and less, as do adults.

i’m starting my PhD this year (I’ve done my A-Levels, Bachelors, and Masters consecutively, so I’ll possibly have my PhD by the time I’m in my mid 20s). I’m not doing it for the job prospects - either I’ll earn more as a result (and pay more of my student finance off) or I won’t, and my student finance payments won’t change (they stack, so I essentially pay the same whether I just have the masters or the masters and PhD).

I'm doing my PhD because I really want one. I want to contribute, I want to research, and I want to have the accomplishment.

“degrees are worthless”. No, they’re just becoming standard - lots employers expect you to have one (or an equivalent).

There’s no law that says you have to work with your chosen degree. I worked in my field for years before I realised I was miserable and started my own business that you need very little qualifications for.

I was made redundant a year ago. They got rid of half my team and the other half were let go 6 months later. 18 months ago there was a change in board members and two hedge fund managers were put on the board. Since then they have let striped out the company and are only focusing on pushing one arm of the business to the point it can be sold. 80% of the research staff have been made redundant. I know 2 other companies in the field that have done the same so there's a glut research scientists that are now out of work.
In 2025 there were £2 billion of biotechnology projects stopped in the UK and moved to other countries as the UK is looking less and less appealing to science.
I have former colleagues with PhDs and 10+ year experience in working in the field who have been out of work for 6-12 months and can't find a job. The competition is so high and companies are looking for perfect candidates. Some of my former colleagues have had the luxury of living off their redundancy package whilst they looked for work but some had applied to supermarkets the week they were made redundant as they need money whilst they find a job continuing their career. Interview processes don't help either and nearly all the roles have 4 or 5 steps and can take 2 months from the initial application to getting through to the final decision followed by 2-6 weeks to go through the contracts process. Even if you are successful with the first application that you submit on the day you were made redundant you are looking at finding 3 months worth of living costs. Most people don't have the savings to cover 3 months of living costs and redundancy packages weren't always the most generous and are reliant on you qualifying for it.

While I agree degrees are a good thing, not everyone is or can be academic or wants to study that much and I do think that vocational qualifications and skills need much more attention, priority and value. And there needs to be less of clever: academic route, not academic: vocational (or on the scrapheap as there isn't even a course to do our route for you to take.

Damn. I’m really sorry to hear that. I hope you find something soon.

Yeah, I’m not an economist, but even I can see that what was designed to be positive has had a very serious impact at all levels of hiring. For more senior people the impact is being paid circa 40k less than your previous package, on the basis firms are recruiting at the bottom of their pay bands - to ensure they are not paying more overall. Starmer has a lot to answer for, even amongst the most rabid of Labour's supporters.

Yes I agree a lot of Mickey Mouse degrees.

Absolutely.

Lidl / Aldi are far to savvy to impressed by a Phd or even a masters.

This person MUST have had considerable retail and management experience, they would be absolutely useless otherwise.