Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2015. All figures are from 2014-2015, including unemployment rates by field of study (INE Labour Force Survey, 2014), 1.7 million university students and 2.5 million young people neither studying nor working. Spanish unemployment has fallen considerably since.
Spain is becoming a tough country for recent university graduates. To begin with, there seems to be a fundamental flaw in our education system. Even so, some degrees offer better job prospects than others.
César Molinas, a mathematician and economist, founding partner of Multa Paucis and CEO of Cross Road Biotech, gave a talk in Zaragoza titled “The role of innovation and education in building Spain’s future.”
In that talk he stated his conviction that Spain has a dysfunctional education system that needs changes, starting as early as nursery school, so that education fosters students’ creativity, because the system is a machine for producing unemployed people.
Spain has 1.7 million university students and 2.5 million people who neither study nor work and who struggle to get into the job market, because the education system has not taught them how to do anything.
(See: the 20 best and worst jobs)
César Molinas warned that this system needs to be fixed because “otherwise things will be very difficult for us, and we will go on having an education system that keeps producing unemployed people.” The economist puts forward a series of proposals and changes intended to respond to global challenges, because we are in a process of accelerating technological change.
In the economist’s view, in the very near future there will be demand for every occupation that has a creative component.
According to the INE’s Labour Force Survey (INE is Spain’s National Statistics Institute) for 2014, mathematicians and statisticians are the groups least affected by unemployment in Spain, with an unemployment rate of 5.7%. These figures match our earlier article on the best and worst jobs of 2015.
They also match the study which found that maths and social skills will make you earn more money than average.
Next come people working in security services, with an unemployment rate of 7.45%.
These two groups are the only ones with an unemployment rate below 10%. They are followed by those with a law degree, at 10.63%, veterinarians at 10.65% and health, at 12.18%.
The INE survey concludes that during the crisis the least educated groups were the ones hit hardest by unemployment. People with only basic education have an unemployment rate of 30.89%.
Below is the table of fields of study and the unemployment rate for each.
| Field of study | Unemployment rate (%) |
|---|---|
| Mathematics and statistics | 5.70% |
| Security services | 7.45% |
| Law | 10.63% |
| Veterinary science | 10.65% |
| Health | 12.18% |
| Transport services | 12.64% |
| Teacher training and education science | 13.94% |
| Physical sciences, chemistry and geology | 14.27% |
| Computing | 14.91% |
| Agriculture, livestock and fishing | 15.08% |
| Social and behavioural sciences | 15.45% |
| Humanities | 16.01% |
| Journalism and information | 16.56% |
| Basic education programmes | 30.89% |
| Unknown, unspecified or not applicable | 39.25% |
See also: The 50-30-20 rule for success in your career
Featured image: Ajzh2074, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
