Underemployment's impact on vocational behavior: a multidisciplinary exploration and methodological innovation

This chapter provides a multidisciplinary perspective on underemployment and its impact on individuals' vocational behaviour. It underscores the short- and long-term effects of underemployment on career trajectories, choices, opportunities and decision-making, emphasizes often overlooked structural barriers within mainstream vocational behaviour literature, and introduces innovative research methods. These contributions offer alternative viewpoints and guide future research agendas, with a particular focus on marginalized workers.

Our approach to underemployment combines considerations of skills underemployment (working below qualification, skills, experience) with underemployment in relation to time (working fewer hours than ideally wished for) and pay (being paid below the real living wage). Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach (Repko, 2012), the holistic assessment of underemployment is a novel way to assess how underemployment shapes vocational choices and decision-making, career trajectories and lived experiences of individuals, particularly within a labour market characterised by insecure and underpaid employment.

A key contribution of the chapter is to advance the research agenda on individuals at the margins of the labour market by suggesting methodological and conceptual approaches that provide alternatives to mainstream literatures (McKee-Ryan & Harvey, 2011). The inclusion of diverse voices and experiences enriches the understanding of vocational behaviour and ensures a more comprehensive approach to career research. The chapter concludes by making suggestions about future research agendas that further this important area of academic and policy-relevant work.