“Overqualification among workers with higher education is linked to significant wage inequalities and varied exposure to atypical labor contracts,” states a study by the Collaborative Laboratory for Work, Employment, and Social Protection (CoLABOR), which will be presented on Wednesday at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon.
The study reveals that “in 2023, the average earnings of overqualified university graduates were 36.8% lower than those in jobs matching their educational qualifications.” Furthermore, it notes that “overqualified individuals are more exposed to contractual precarity (27%)” compared to their properly qualified counterparts.
Differences also exist between the overqualification levels among immigrant and native populations. The study reports that “in 2023, the educational overqualification of the foreign workforce employed in Portugal’s private sector was 27.1%, rising to 44.9% for the more strictly defined group of foreign workers with higher education,” which are “substantially higher values compared to the overall private sector workforce,” the authors note.
The study ‘Work, Employment, and Social Protection 2025’ highlights that contractual precarity “remains highly prevalent in Portugal’s private sector,” with one-third of private sector workers holding non-permanent contracts in 2023. This figure “rises significantly among younger cohorts and across several municipalities, particularly in the Alentejo coast and Algarve regions.”
The authors attribute these figures to “the fact that non-permanent contracting is typically involuntary, meaning individuals accept fixed-term employment because they could not find a job offering permanent contracts.”
On another note, despite recent progress in reducing gender inequalities in the labor market, “considerable inequities persist both in terms of opportunities and wage gaps.”
Thus, the study highlights that while women represent about 45% of full-time employment in the private sector, they hold only 36% of leadership positions. Women predominate in management roles related to caregiving but are underrepresented in executive positions (28.4%), with the adjusted salary gap in this professional group reaching 21%.
The effects of the climate transition on employment were also examined in this study, indicating that ‘green’ jobs (those contributing directly or indirectly to a low-carbon or net-zero carbon economy) have increased in absolute terms but declined as a proportion of total employment.
In 2023, there were 463.4 thousand private sector workers in activities classified as green, 105.2 thousand more than in 2014, accounting for 13.1% of total employment (below the 14.6% recorded in 2010).
The analysis of ‘brown’ jobs shows a significant concentration of emissions: 80% of workers occupy jobs responsible for only 15% of emissions, while the remaining 20% account for 85% of the total.
“This pattern shows that a small set of professions is responsible for the majority of emissions, making them especially vulnerable to greenhouse gas reduction policies,” CoLABOR notes in a statement, further estimating that “between 126,000 and 300,000 jobs may undergo profound transformations, both in number and functional content, to meet the stringent demands of emission reduction.”
