Teachers who graduate in physical education end up doing other work different from their training. That is to say, their studies and subsequent occupation do not agree and the official statistics indicate this.
In part, this phenomenon is common to the rest of university graduates from various countries and studied under the term overqualification. In this Psychology-Online article, we show part of the evolution in the last three years and we will analyze the profile of the physical education teacher, his career and occupation.
Career as a physical education teacher
Those titled as Teacher of physical education specialty They face a complex labor market in which they perform jobs below their professional qualifications. Overqualification describes that situation in which people are employed in jobs whose level of training required to perform them is below the academic education available to the worker or candidate (Quintini, 2011b).
Without wishing to simplify such a complex issue, as it affects countries with different levels of economic development, different cultures and demographic structures, some important common data can be seen: it is constantly increasing in all European countries, it is higher among women, at less during the decade studied 2003-2013 (Mc Guiness, op. cit.; Davia et als, 2017).
Specifically, in this report we intend to echo the evolution over these three years, in which a certain degree of improvement in the economic crisis situation in our country, focusing on the number of graduates in Teaching – Physical Education, the number of contracts and in which occupations they have occurred, based on data from the State Public Employment Service (SEPE).
Characteristics of overqualification
If we stick to the most economic dimension, we point out the existence of substantial differences depending on the geographical area, that is to say, that over-qualification rates are higher and more volatile in the surroundings of peripheral European countries (Mediterranean area), lower in Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Netherlands) and appears to follow a cyclical pattern.
Finally, they indicate that among the factors that most contribute to this phenomenon are those related to the composition and the level of labor demandlabor supply and the structure of education and, a growing trend towards the dispersion of the group of workers with university education.
According to García-Montalvo (2009 a) overqualification has a high degree of persistence, so much so that after five years 25% of young people remain in the same situation and less than a third will manage to change to another job in accordance with their qualification. It also reduces the profitability of education, as it increases.
Effects of overqualification
García-Montalvo (2009) points out: “The consequences of over-qualification are multiple. From the point of view of educational policy, a permanent situation of over-qualification means subsidizing, by reducing the private cost, an activity that does not provide society with the expected return and that simply becomes an expensive procedure for subsidizing selection processes. of company personnel. In this way, a part of the resources allocated to education could be dedicated to activities with greater social profitability.
“From the workers’ point of view, overqualification generates enormous job dissatisfaction that can have effects both on their behavior at work (absenteeism, high turnover) and on their health (poor psychological health, drug problems, etc.). etc.).
This situation would lead to lower productivity with respect to workers who have jobs adjusted to their qualifications, which would also be a problem for companies. Budría and Moro-Egido (2008) show that the increase in strong overqualification in Spain results in a significant increase in the dispersion of salaries within the group of university students.” pp. 12-13.
The methodological difficulties associated with the measurement of the mismatch between qualifications and the occupations performed are multiple and are far from the objective of this work, however, a distinction is made between objective and subjective measurements, with a large number of factors considered when studying them.
Social impact of overqualification
These continuous ups and downs do not solve the problem of insertion, nor of the employment of graduates, achieving that increase frustration among students and generating worrying disorientation. However, first-hand, the analysis is easy, as pointed out by Pineda et als (2016) who indicate that “the results demonstrate the negative effect of the crisis on the job placement of graduates and their conditions. The employment percentage of education graduates drops, from the 2007 class to 2010, by almost 10%.
The occupations have less contractual stability and a worse fit with the careers studied, aggravating the problem of overqualification” pp. 5. This mismatch of training and qualification is an argument that acts as a reference for a large number of phenomena (Mavromaras, KS, 2013; Robts, 2007). An equally interesting dimension is that related to the repercussions on individuals and health effects and the behavior of many frustrated candidates and students, and even among immigrant populations (Chen, 2010, George, 2015).
However, despite its obvious interest, it is not the object of this research. Without disregarding the importance of these phenomena, we are going to focus on the existing data on the number of unemployed, the number of contracts made and depending on the official data offered by the Spanish public employment system.
Facts about working as a physical education teacher
If we look at the data of the Table 1, there is a decrease in the number of job seekers with the qualification of “Teacher, Specialty of Physical Education” from 6,193 in March 2015 to 5,305 in March 2017. Of which 66.94% were unemployed and 69.9% had a job prior to that included in the official data. The same trend can be seen in the number of registered unemployed (row 2), decreasing, and in the volume of people with a previous job, also decreasing (row 3). However, despite including a greater number of degrees, it should be noted that the number of applicants was reduced by less than 888 people, in a three-year period.
Regarding the number of most hired occupations, we take the official data where the ten most representative ones are reflected, quantitatively. It can be seen that in March 2015 the most hired occupation was “Recreational activities and entertainment monitor”, followed by “Salary waiters”. The same trend is repeated in March 2016, although it decreases in the first case (recreational activities monitor…), and is maintained in March 2017, but to a lesser extent. Without wishing to sound defeatist, the data seem to indicate that, possibly, our educational and productive system, cannot insert our graduatesnot even in occupations outside our natural professional field: teaching, or at least it does so insufficiently
Aware of the inability to deduce the quality and satisfaction of graduates with the new job, as well as the adjustment between their expectations and the contracts to which they finally access, based only on these statistical data, we try to offer a panoramic view of the situation offered by such official data. The economic crisis has given rise to a labor situation characterized by temporality, salary precariousness, and the recovery translates into greater employment in the services sector (hospitality and tourism) (Economy Weblog, 2017).
TABLE 1:
The effect of the gender gap
In sum, 1 in every four contracts is for women, 1 in five for unemployed women, therefore susceptible to being hired. It cannot be established, which undoubtedly exists, from these very succinct data, the reason underlying this low level of hiring and under-representation of women in unemployment statistics, when there is also the perception of making up the majority of students in these careers (data that we currently lack). Reasons related to motherhood, the need to care for minors and dependent elderly people, the possible abandonment of unemployment records due to discouragement, the recourse to making way for the professional development of the husband or partner (with better salaries and professional projection) are pointed out, along with with the feminization of the teaching profession. Many of these factors are aggravated by .
In principle, the data could be interpreted in the opposite sense, as favorable to women: they represent a lower proportion of unemployed and equally of contracts. But, given that it is a very simplistic interpretation and that it is not legal to draw such conclusions from these data, we must indicate that we do not know the reality that underlies these data collected here. We intend to highlight these data and to help, if they are of interest, to the debate on the training, qualification and insertion of the students and, when reflecting on the new qualifications, curricula (the easy solution is to change the qualification and have the teacher disappear of physical education and also the statistical criteria of the unemployed). No less important would be to study the repercussions on people, on a psychological and personal level, although this aspect is not the objective of this study.
Working as a physical education teacher and overqualification: conclusions
Overqualification, understood as the gap between the level of training achieved by a person and the qualification necessary to perform a certain job, is an important factor when studying the insertion of university graduates.
Its importance is not negligible when planning the development of students’ training and qualifications, as well as their subsequent job placement. This phenomenon has an impact on the training expenditure incurred by both society as a whole and individual individuals and their families. And even, it has no less importance in the economic return received by society and the people who undergo this training: society as a whole makes a significant investment and expense in the generation of a human resource, which in the long run underuse.
However, these data point to a poor insertion of graduates who have to turn their future work towards occupations for which they are overqualified or directly unprepared (waiters, postmen, agricultural laborers, etc.). Furthermore, they are committed to part-time jobswith a high number of contracts and…