underemployment

Two graduates leave the same university with the same result in Mechanical Engineering. One is unemployed, sending out applications every week, living on jollof and hope. The other is employed, riding an app based motorcycle full time to make ends meet, or manning a POS stand near the roundabout. On paper, only the first one shows up in the unemployment statistics. The second one has a job, a daily income, even a small identity card that says 'agent'. But something is clearly not adding up, because four years of engineering training is sitting idle while he counts change for airtime top ups.

That second graduate is underemployed. He is not jobless. He is under used. His training, his time, and his earning potential are all being wasted calmly inside a job that does not need any of what he studied to do it. Underemployment hides inside the employment figures like a guest who has technically been let into the party but is standing outside the gate the whole night.

It shows up in different forms. Someone with a full accounting degree working as a receptionist because that is the only offer that came. A tailor who trained for years but only gets two customers a week, so she is technically self employed and technically idle at the same time. A Nigerian nurse in the United Kingdom doing agency shifts far below her clinical grade because the right post has not opened yet, or the visa route only allows certain roles at first.

It also shows up as time underemployment, which is simpler to consider. A market woman who wants to sell from 7am to 6pm every day but only gets enough customers and stock to justify three hours of actual selling. She is present, she is willing, but the work available to her is thinner than her appetite for it.

Economists watch underemployment closely because a country can report a low unemployment rate and still be sitting on a mountain of wasted human capital. The numbers look fine. The lived reality tells a different story.