What is "structural unemployment"

n. (context economics English) A type of unemployment explained by a mismatch between the requirements of the employers and the properties (such as skills, age, gender or location) of the unemployed.

Structural unemployment is a form of 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 of today's workers obsolete, and can be addressed by either providing better information to workers who are structurally unemployed or by retraining these workers to fill new jobs that are in higher demand in the economy.

Another way of addressing structural unemployment would be retraining workers with obsolete job skills to work in fields that need workers with a different set of skills. When welders on automobile assembly lines were replaced by robots, the demand for welders went down, but the demand for people to maintain and program automobile assembly line robots went up. Workers who lost their jobs as welders on assembly lines when robots were introduced could be retrained to maintain and program those same robots. Those workers who were able to successfully retrain to maintain and program assembly line robots would no longer be unemployed, and less structural unemployment would exist in the economy.

Structural unemployment is one of several major categories of unemployment distinguished by economists, including frictional unemployment, cyclical unemployment, and classical unemployment.

Because it requires either migration or re-training, structural unemployment can be long-term and slow to fix.