Overqualified is a polite word for not enough jobs

The rejection that made me laugh

I applied to stock shelves at a grocery store a while back. Night shift, nothing fancy. A week later I got the email. They were going in another direction because I was overqualified.

For years I was told I didn't have enough. Not enough school, not enough training, not enough experience. Then I finally had enough, and it turned out that was also the wrong amount.

There's apparently a narrow band of qualified somewhere, and nobody will tell you where it is.

What the word actually means

Overqualified sounds like a compliment. It isn't. It's a manager's guess that you'll leave the moment something better comes along, or that you'll be bored, or that you'll ask for more money.

And honestly, they're usually right. Because the job you trained for exists, it just has three hundred people waiting for it. The shelf job is what's left when the queue doesn't move.

So overqualified doesn't mean you have too much. It means the economy has too few of the jobs it told you to train for.

Hiding your degree

People now take their degrees off their resumes to get hired. Think about that. Years of school, real debt, and the move is to pretend it never happened.

Some people drop the master's. Some drop the bachelor's. Some trim ten years of experience so they look young and cheap enough. It's a strange kind of reverse lying, where you shrink yourself until you fit the slot.

We used to say education was the thing nobody could take away from you. Turns out you can take it away yourself, if you want to work at all.

Training was supposed to be the answer

Every time the job market gets worse, the advice is the same. More education, more training, a new certificate. As if the problem is that people aren't skilled enough.

But you can't train your way into jobs that don't exist. All more training does is raise the bar on the jobs that do exist. Yesterday's degree job becomes today's master's job, and the degree people get pushed down into the shelf jobs, where they're overqualified.

It's the same pile of people, just sorted again. Everyone climbs one rung and the ladder stays the same height.

Surplus, not failure

When there are more trained, willing people than paid roles, some of them are going to end up doing work that doesn't need them, or no work at all. That isn't laziness. It's what a surplus of labour looks like up close.

The cruel part is how personal it feels. You start thinking you picked the wrong major, wasted your twenties, should have known better. But a whole generation can't all have picked wrong. At some point it's the menu, not the order.

A floor makes the word go away

If everyone had a basic floor, UBI, neetbux, whatever you call it, overqualified would stop being a trap. You wouldn't need to hide a degree to eat. You could take the shelf job because you like the quiet at night, or skip it because it isn't worth it.

Learning would get to be learning again, not a down payment on a job that might never show up. People could study something because it's interesting, without having to justify it to a hiring filter.

Less education as a toll booth, less training as a lottery ticket. More people allowed to just be good at things without that being a problem.

Meanwhile

If you've been called overqualified, you didn't do too much. You did what you were told, in an economy that stopped holding up its end. And if you want a little coming in without shrinking your resume, the AI you already pay for can claim paid micro-tasks for sats on neetbros.

Keep the degree on your wall, even if it comes off the resume. It still counts. It just doesn't count for rent, and that part was never your fault.