Horizontal education-job mismatch in a medium-sized Japanese company

This study examines the effects of horizontal education-job mismatch on employees’ work attitudes and career visions in a medium-sized Japanese company, using newly available longitudinal personnel data and employee satisfaction survey data. The empirical results revealed that horizontal education-job mismatch is a high-frequency time-varying phenomenon within organizations. Additionally, the study showed that horizontal education-job mismatch has a negative impact on employees’ work attitudes and career visions, even after controlling for individual-specific effects. Although these findings are consistent with previous studies regarding the existence of and negative effects of education-job mismatch in the labor market, given the heterogeneity of institutional frameworks across countries, the results of this study must be linked to the pertinent institutional contexts of the Japanese labor market with its distinctive structures. When considering improvement of horizontal education-job mismatch, previous research suggests that higher education institutions need to provide education more consistent with the skill demands in the labor market. However, because human resource management in an organization has a significant influence on incidences of horizontal education-job mismatch in Japan, matching labor demand (task) to labor supply (skill) may be more important than matching labor supply to labor demand in order to improve horizontal education-job mismatch.