Problems faced by tertiary education graduates in the labour market in the Czech Republic

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to inform about growing unemployment among graduates from universities and higher professional schools in the Czech Republic. Besides the economic recession, which influenced the increase in unemployment rate among all population, and the demographic development, the main cause of this increase is problems in Czech tertiary education. Compared to the EU, the Czech Republic had in the early 1990s very low percentage of people who completed tertiary education. One of the negative consequences of the effort to change this situation quickly was a sharp increase in the number of universities and higher professional schools. This increase (especially with private schools) was enabled by newly adopted legislation measures, while the whole system still lacked a regulatory element. Tertiary education has therefore become open to masses, and its level (of graduates' knowledge and skills) has declined. Moreover, the emergence of schools with lower investment requirements (economic fields and humanities) has led to an unsuitable field structure among graduates. The quantitative research was based on secondary information sources; the qualitative research was done by the author of this paper, by means of collecting primary information. The most frequent tools were interviews with graduates, employers (business owners, personnel managers), and job centre employees during the period of February 2010 to July 2010. This survey is based on the following working hypothesis: The main cause of the growing unemployment among tertiary education graduates in the Czech Republic is problems in the Czech tertiary education. The author is going to further develop the research with the objective to identify and describe the main causes of graduates' insufficient ability to enter labour market. The research seeks to contribute to finding starting points to solve the problem of growing unemployment among university and higher professional school graduates. Data from this paper will be used in the author's doctoral thesis. Paper relevance: The growth in unemployment in the Czech Republic is caused, besides other things, by the economic recession. However, increasing unemployment among university graduates is caused above all by poor organization and running of the tertiary education sector, it is necessary to change this and this research should contribute to it.