Education-Jobs Gap

From the Preface: "The education-jobs gap refers to the discrepancy between our work-related knowledge and our opportunities to use this knowledge in interesting and fairly compensated work. [This text's] basic argument is that our knowledge generally far exceeds our job opportunities. We are wasting large human learning capacities and achievements through our failure to recognize the existence of a massive 'knowledge society' in a vast array of formally organized and informal learning practices...

"Most of this book is devoted to documenting the unprecedented amount of present learning activity, assessing the extensive and multi-faceted 'underemployment' of this learning in paid workplaces, and offering an explanation for why this wastage is happening. The pressures in private market-based economies to sell more cheaply than competitors by reducing labour costs and automating production have led to unprecedented numbers of willing workers being made redundant in terms of one or more of the many faces of underemployment. Each of these faces, namely the talent use gap, structural unemployment, involuntary reduced employment, the credential gap, the performance gap, and subjective underemployment, is carefully scrutinized."

D.W. Livingstone is Canada Research Chair in Lifelong Learning and Work at the University of Toronto, Head of the Centre for the Study of Education and Work at OISE/UT, and Director of the SSHRC national research network on "The Changing Nature of Work and Lifelong Learning."