Mexico City — Young people in Mexico are flooding TikTok with a trend that shows the labor reality of many graduates: working in areas that are not related to the university degrees they studied.
Engineers, nurses, lawyers or administrators have joined this trend in recent days to express that, despite having a degree or diploma that accredits their university studies, they ended up working in an area other than their studies, which ended the dreams they had when they were studying.
The trend shows cases such as that of a young woman who in 2019 graduated as a teacher and said she was ready to realize her dream of teaching, but in 2023 ended up being employed in a pharmacy.
Or the case of a young man who graduated from the country’s National Polytechnic in 2021 as an engineer and in 2023 is working as an employee in a call center. Although the pay is not bad, since it is a bilingual call center, the young man says that mentally and physically it is a job that has him frustrated and eager to quit.
Although the trend shows cases mostly of young Mexicans, there are some users who claim that this problem is also suffered by young people from other Latin American countries.
This trend in TikTok has made young people question the value of a university degree for getting a job, even if it is from a prestigious private school, such as young graduates of the Tec de Monterrey, one of Mexico’s most prestigious private universities, who today are employed in a trade or work in areas other than those in which they studied.
Impact of the pandemic
Something in common among the various stories of young people is that the graduates from 2019 had to enter the labor market at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic paralyzed economies and changed the labor dynamics.
According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), young people in Latin American labor markets are suffering historic difficulties as they face greater labor intermittency, explained, in part, by the intense inflows and outflows of the labor force.
Greater occupational instability, in turn, is associated with their greater prevalence in informal, precarious, and low-skilled activities.
There may also be situations in which a shortage of highly skilled opportunities in occupations results in a large proportion of over-qualified workers, and situations in which employers report skill shortages despite the availability of workers with the required skill levels, for example, because wages and working conditions may not be competitive.
The ‘divorce’ between companies and graduates
To end-2022, the average affinity of the occupation of professionals with respect to their studies is 77.3%, with the arts having the highest percentage of affinity with 90.2%, according to the National Occupation and Employment Survey (ENOE).
In contrast, 53% of professionals employed in the area of business economics work in activities that are not lined up with their professional training.
A study by Coparmex, the Mexican confederation of employers’, and IMCO concerning job vacancies in Mexico and published this week shows that 40% of companies report difficulty in filling vacancies as the main problem, while 25% have the problem of a shortage of qualified workers.
In order to fill vacancies, there are companies that place a banner on their front door offering a “hiring bonus” as an incentive to attract job seekers.
The challenge of labor shortage faced by some companies in the country does not necessarily reflect a shortage of people of working age, but may be due to other conditions that inhibit the entry of the population into the labor market, said Ana Bertha Gutiérrez, IMCO’s labor market and foreign trade coordinator.
She added that in Mexico the fact that there are unfilled vacancies is a matter of barriers or lack of incentives for people to participate in the economy, since there are more than 10 million people who could be working and who have the potential to fill those vacancies.
Héctor Márquez, president of Coparmex’s human capital commission, said that employers say they have a shortage of people to fill vacancies, while young people say there is no work.
“Both are right,” Márquez said.
He pointed out that young people do not apply for vacancies because they do not agree with the salaries being paid, and because in the jobs available they do not see an opportunity for growth.