Job-Field Underemployment and Career Satisfaction: A Relationship of Cause and Effect

Abstract

The current article deals with the interesting phenomenon of mismatch between an academic graduate's field of education and their field of occupation (a phenomenon known in the literature as horizontal-mismatch or job-field underemployment), and its impact on the individual's career satisfaction. Some studies regarding the broader phenomenon of underemployment suggest that graduates might temporarily accept an underemployed job in order to avoid unemployment and obtain some work experience, but even though most of the relatively scarce articles on the subject suggest it is usually an involuntary phenomenon, almost none of them specifically focus on the case of job-field underemployment.
 
 310 Israeli academics with almost-equal gender representation participated in this study. A statistically significant negative correlation has been found, according to which, the greater an individuals’ level of job-field underemployment, the lower their career satisfaction level. The main conclusion of the present study is that the individuals’ quality of job-field fit appears to be a very significant component in their career perception: The individual, being rational, will invest in a specific field of education in order to integrate into the labor market accordingly. Therefore, this phenomenon is not desirable for the individual, and it requires more informed career planning by the individual in order to avoid experiencing this phenomenon in the first place. At the macro-economic level, this requires better labor-market adjustments between the supply of labor and the demand for jobs.