ABSTRACT
The chapter assesses the question of to what extent can people use their learning abilities and increasing knowledge in contemporary societies primarily in terms of the relation between people's learning abilities and their opportunities to apply these capacities in paid employment. Six distinct dimensions of discrepancies between education and jobs are documented here. These are: the talent use gap; structural unemployment; involuntary reduced employment; the credential gap; the performance gap; and subjective underemployment. All six dimensions of "underemployment" or "subemployment" have previously been studied, but rarely if ever have they all been examined together. The full extent of the wastage of people's knowledge and skills by the contemporary organization of paid work has therefore usually been seriously underestimated. Rather than presumptively trivializing the problem, interested researchers should be looking more closely at the actual experiences of those currently living in the education-jobs gap.
