Structural unemployment
unemployment caused by a skills gap between workers and firms
Structural unemployment is a form of involuntary unemployment caused by a mismatch between the skills that workers in the economy can offer, and the skills demanded of workers by employers (also known as the skills gap). Structural unemployment is often brought about by technological changes that make the job skills of many workers obsolete.
Structural unemployment is one of three categories of unemployment distinguished by economists, the others being frictional unemployment and cyclical unemployment.
Because it requires either migration or re-training, structural unemployment can be long-term and slow to fix.
Causes and examples
From an individual perspective, structural unemployment can be due to:
Inability to afford or decision not to pursue further education or job training.
Choice of a field of study which did not produce marketable job skills.
Inability to afford relocation.
Inability to relocate due to inability to sell a house (for example due to the collapse of a real estate bubble or of the local economy).
Decision not to relocate, in order to stay with a spouse, family, friends, etc.
From a larger perspective, there can be a number of reasons for structural unemployment across large numbers of workers:
Technological obsolescence makes a specific expertise useless.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Structural unemployment” as unemployment caused by a skills gap between workers and firms. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as unemployment caused by a skills gap between workers and firms. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3238438. The Library of Congress control number is sh85139651. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Structural unemployment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.