Why highly qualified immigrants still end up in low skill jobs in Denmark
- The International
- Oct 23
- 3 min read
Denmark advertises itself as a talent-hungry nation, yet many well-educated migrants find themselves stuck in jobs that do not use their qualifications. This article digs into the statistics and asks whether recruitment initiatives really deliver.
Images: Kelly Draper Rasmussen
Text: Kelly Draper Rasmussen
A warm welcome
We stood in the courtyard of the historic cathedral school while the Mayor of Aarhus, Anders Winnerskjold, addressed us: “Thank you, expats, for coming here, working hard and contributing. We need you. We hope you stay.”
Dansk Industri put out regular reports about how more foreign labour is needed to generate growth, and how much growth and income international workers have already contributed. They say Denmark has a serious skills gap amongst homegrown people, so people from abroad must be encouraged to move here.
The charm offensive appears to be working: there are over 600,000 immigrants of working age in Denmark, 60% of whom have post-secondary school certificates. In the landscape of a major skills gap, one would assume that these highly qualified people must be able to walk straight into skilled jobs and senior positions.
The overqualification trap
There is a cliché of overqualified immigrants having to take any job to survive. Surely in a country like Denmark, with such a thirst for advanced skills, the ‘Useless Foreign Qualification’ phenomenon is unheard of. And yet, many know someone highly qualified who struggles to find a job or has had to take unskilled jobs to make ends meet. Since the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘evidence’, let’s dig into the available statistics to estimate the possible level of under-employment of foreigners in Denmark, including immigrants with naturalised Danish citizenship.
Roughly two thirds of immigrants have some sort of job; the remainder are either officially unemployed or otherwise outside of the labour market. A quarter of those in employment are working part-time. 8% of the immigrant population are students and around half of these international students have part-time jobs.
A graduate pool that doesn’t add up
Almost a third of immigrants in employment hold mid or senior-level positions. There are more than 300,000 immigrants with higher qualifications, yet fewer than 130,000 work at senior or management levels. However, among Danish citizens, there are 1.2 million graduates and 1 million people working at senior or management levels. If there is a huge skills gap, what is preventing international graduates from being given more responsibilities, especially since the pool of qualified Danes is (apparently) exhausted?
Let’s put it another way. There are about 300,000 immigrants without higher qualifications. Nearly 200,000 immigrants do not have jobs. Another 130,000 are in entry-level positions. Even with generous assumptions, tens of thousands of highly qualified immigrants are working in entry-level jobs. And some crucial numbers remain hidden: for example, if someone works for a delivery app, they are classified as self-employed and not included in the statistics.
To add some nuance, let’s take the two big aggregations of immigrants and look at how the stats break down: men and women, and Western and non-Western. Despite women being more likely to have post-secondary qualifications, the same proportion have entry-level jobs as men, and the unemployment rate is higher. Despite there being more non-Western graduates, there are more Westerners in higher-level positions.
When even Danish degrees don’t pay off
Perhaps international graduates struggle to find their place in the Danish work market because their foreign qualifications are not recognised. However, what is truly baffling is that international graduates of Danish schools have a harder time getting their first job than Danish graduates, and those who do find employment are paid less on average than their Danish counterparts.
There are individual stories among the data. Not everyone working entry-level or part-time is underemployed. After all, a new graduate’s first job is likely to be entry-level. Not everyone can or needs to work. The statistics only hint, they do not shout.
Nevertheless, there is a serious mismatch between the messages we hear from mayors and industry leaders. If there is demand for a highly qualified international workforce, shouldn’t full-time work in senior positions be more common for foreigners? Why are non-Westerners and women overlooked, despite their qualifications and skills? Could anything be done to match people who are already here in shortage industries before looking overseas for new people? The rhetoric does not match the reality of job seeking in Denmark.
Sources
Statbank.dk tables: FOLK1C, LIGEAB8, LIGEUB1, RAS201, RAS308, UDDAKT12
(all data from 2023-2024)
