Underemployment in Singapore: A Focus on Skills, Qualification, and Education Field Mismatches

Economic competitiveness and productivity are critical to Singapore’s success. However, changes in the economic and technological landscape have influenced how human capital is developed, deployed, and matched to jobs. Tasks and skills requirements are rapidly changing as industries digitise and digitalise, and career pathways from education are more varied and fluid than before. Many are also rethinking their employment choices and work-life priorities, leading them to embark on alternative careers. Collectively, these lead to the phenomenon of underemployment. Hence, this study focused on understanding how workers are refining their balance of career, aspirations, and personal life in Singapore and its implications on underemployment. Through a survey conducted with 1,100 Singapore Citizens and Permanent Resident workers in October 2025, we found that expanding our tracking of underemployment beyond a time-based indicator of underemployment to include skills, qualifications, and education field mismatches provides a more nuanced snapshot of underemployment in the workforce. We found that 22.5% in our sample were overskilled, 23.0% and 20.3% were overqualified for their job or occupational category respectively, and 31.4% worked in jobs that did not match their field. Nevertheless, the prevalence of qualification–job and qualification–occupation mismatch is comparable in Singapore to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies and other high-income countries, while skills–job and education field–job mismatches are notably lower. Furthermore, we found that workers who reported being underemployed on subjective dimensions such as inadequate pay or involuntary temporary work were also more likely to report lower job satisfaction.