Abstract
The current article deals with the interesting phenomenon of mismatch between an academic graduate's field of education and their field of occupation (a phenomenon known in the literature as horizontal-mismatch or job-field underemployment), and its impact on the individual's career satisfaction. Some studies regarding the broader phenomenon of underemployment suggest that graduates might temporarily accept an underemployed job in order to avoid unemployment and obtain some work experience, but even though most of the relatively scarce articles on the subject suggest it is usually an involuntary phenomenon, almost none of them specifically focus on the case of job-field underemployment.
 
 310 Israeli academics with almost-equal gender representation participated in this study. A statistically significant negative correlation has been found, according to which, the greater an individuals’ level of job-field underemployment, the lower their career satisfaction level. The main conclusion of the present study is that the individuals’ quality of job-field fit appears to be a very significant component in their career perception: The individual, being rational, will invest in a specific field of education in order to integrate into the labor market accordingly. Therefore, this phenomenon is not desirable for the individual, and it requires more informed career planning by the individual in order to avoid experiencing this phenomenon in the first place. At the macro-economic level, this requires better labor-market adjustments between the supply of labor and the demand for jobs.
Highlights
The phenomenon of the inefficient allocation or under-allocation of resources in general, and of the human capital resource in particular, has been a common phenomenon in recent years in the labor economics of the economies of Western, developed and industrialized countries (Morck, Yavuz, & Yeung, 2011)
Based on the standardized regression coefficients (β), it may be observed that a positive correlation was found between each of the “organizational citizenship behavior” and “income level” variables and the dependent variable – that is to say, the higher the level of organizational citizenship behavior the individual experiences and/or the higher their income level, the higher their career satisfaction
This study examined the implications of an academic individual experiencing job-field underemployment on their continued career management and planning in terms of career satisfaction, which constitutes both the innovation this study brings and its unique contribution to the vast body of literature in this field
Summary
The phenomenon of the inefficient allocation or under-allocation of resources in general, and of the human capital resource in particular, has been a common phenomenon in recent years in the labor economics of the economies of Western, developed and industrialized countries (Morck, Yavuz, & Yeung, 2011). One of the implications of this phenomenon on the economy in the macro level is the formation of surpluses in the supply of resources (and of the human capital resource in particular) in certain fields, at the expense of a shortage in the supply of skilled productive elements in others. Such a business environment in the economy may negatively influence growth (Gomes, 2015) and indirectly – low work productivity rates, as well. This article’s contribution to research is expressed by estimating whether and to what extent this phenomenon is prevalent and voluntary, or whether it is typically an occupational reality after the fact, and involuntary
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