When more than a quarter of the workforce is overeducated for their jobs, the economy pays a productivity penalty. GILS quantifies the cost.
Twenty-seven percent of employed workers in Georgia are overeducated relative to the requirements of their jobs — meaning they hold a higher educational qualification than their current position requires. This figure, derived from IMF 2026 data and Geostat establishment surveys cross-referenced by GILS, is among the highest in the Eastern Partnership region and significantly above the EU average of approximately 19 percent. Understanding what this number means — and what it costs — requires going beyond the headline.
Overeducation is not the same as unemployment. Overeducated workers are employed. But they are employed at wages and productivity levels below what their educational investment would suggest, and below what the economy could achieve if their skills were fully utilised. The IMF’s 2026 Article IV assessment of Georgia estimated that closing the skills utilisation gap — bringing overeducated workers into positions that match their qualifications — could increase aggregate labour productivity by 8–12 percent over a ten-year horizon. In absolute terms, that represents a substantial portion of potential GDP that Georgia’s current education-employment mismatch is leaving unrealised.
The sectoral distribution of overeducation in Georgia follows a predictable pattern. It is highest in agriculture (where tertiary graduates work in subsistence farming), in low-skill services (retail, cleaning, security), and in informal employment more broadly. It is lowest in finance and information technology — sectors where educational requirements have kept pace with, or exceeded, the supply of qualified graduates. The mismatch is thus not uniform: it reflects the structural concentration of formal, skill-appropriate employment in a narrow range of sectors and geographic locations (primarily Tbilisi) while the broader economy absorbs graduates into positions that do not require their qualifications.
The wage penalty of overeducation compounds the misallocation problem. Overeducated workers in Georgia earn approximately 18 percent less than their correctly matched peers with the same level of education. This wage penalty reflects the employer’s assessment that qualifications in excess of job requirements do not add value — or, alternatively, that the qualification signals generic educational attainment rather than job-specific skills. This finding is consistent with the ETF’s assessment that Georgian qualification frameworks are not well aligned with labour market demand: a degree from a Georgian university signals that a person completed a programme, but does not reliably signal what they can do.
The gender dimension of overeducation is significant. Women in Georgia are overeducated at a rate of approximately 31 percent, compared to 23 percent for men. This reflects both the higher educational attainment of Georgian women (who outperform men at every level of the education system) and their concentration in employment below their qualification level — a consequence of the same structural barriers to labour market access that produce the gender employment rate gap and the gender pay gap.
GILS Position: The education mismatch at 27 percent is not primarily an educational system failure — Georgia’s educational outputs compare reasonably well with regional peers on standard measures. It is primarily a labour market failure: the formal economy has not developed the range of high-skill employment opportunities that would allow the qualifications being produced to be used productively. Addressing the mismatch requires investment in the conditions for formal sector growth — rule of law, infrastructure, business environment — alongside the skills anticipation mechanisms and VET reforms that the ETF and the DWCP recommend.
Read the full GILS analysis: https://labour.edu.ge/education-mismatch-georgia/