Employees are considered to be overeducated if their qualifications exceed the qualifications required for the job (Groot & van den Brink, 2000, McGuinness, 2006); in other words, it is a situation when people are employed in jobs that do not require the level of education or skills they have. When overeducated people take jobs below the level of their knowledge and skills, they are "penalized" for doing so and earn less than they could have earned in a suitable job. Overeducation of the higher educated also has adverse efects on less educated- people who do have the ability to perform the work in question, but by having less qualifications, are crowded out of the labor market. (Borghans & De Grip, 2000).
The problem of overeducation, as a subject of theoretical research and a field of interest of state policy, emerged some decades ago. Richard Freeman's work "The Overeducated American" had a landmark importance in sparking the interest in the mentioned topic (Freeman,1976).. Sloan (2003; 2018) and Robust (2007) distinguish vertical and horizontal forms of skills mismatch.. However, "information about how or why certain individuals end up in jobs for which they are overqualified or overskilled, is limited." ( Li,  Harris &Sloane. 2018).
In the international literature there are hardly any studies on overeducation for developing and transformational economies, although the issue of overeducation of the higher educated in these countries is probably far more important than for developed countries as it is most probably a very important cause of the brain drain out of these countries. In Georgia, the number of qualified people exceeds the number of jobs corresponding to their knowledge. Unlike the EU countries, where unemployment is concentrated in the less educated strata, 40% of the unemployed in Georgia have a higher education diploma (Rutkowski, 2013).  This clearly indicates a structural mismatch between labor demand and highly qualified labor supply.

Despite the abovementioned, no scientific study has ever been conducted in Georgia on this issue. The presented project, in this regard, will be the first scientific research focused on skills mismatch in the labor market. Accordingly, the goal of the project is to: (1) determine the professional skills required by enterprises/employers in Georgia, (2) define the role of higher education in talent management  and (3) identify the problem of overeducation and find the ways for its reduction  in Georgia.