A recent report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) claimed that the UK is one of the very few EU countries which saw larger growth in low-skill jobs than in high-skill ones between 1996 and 2008. All this at a time when the share of graduates in the economy increased dramatically.
However, in an article for The Conversation, Andrea Salvatori and colleagues Seetha Menon and Wouter Zwysen explain how new studies for ISER into job polarisation have uncovered flaws in the data and new evidence that in fact graduates are getting high skill jobs and that this sector is growing.
They found that found that the UK has experienced job polarisation in each of the past three decades – with growth in high-pay occupations always exceeding that in the bottom ones. Overall, between 1979 and 2012, the employment share of middling occupations declined by about 19 percentage points – 16 of which were explained by more people doing high-paid occupations.