MBA. Engineering Degree. Still Stuck in a Job That Feels Like a Waste.

By Umang Rajyaguru + C3 · April 17, 2026 · 5 min read

Overqualification is not the problem. Misalignment is. Most Indians chase credentials without asking what they are actually building toward.

On paper, you look good. Engineering degree from a recognisable college. Maybe an MBA on top. A respectable job title. A salary your parents proudly mention at family gatherings. And yet, every Sunday night, you sit with the same dull feeling. You are doing work that anyone with half your education could do. You feel oversized for the role and undersized for any role that would actually use you. You are not lazy. You are not failing. You are misallocated, and almost no one has language for that.

What Is Actually Going Wrong

You confused credentials with direction. Indian education is brilliant at producing credentials. It is terrible at producing direction. So you collected the things you were told to collect, expecting them to add up to a meaningful career, and they did not.

The result is a very specific kind of stuck. You are too qualified to take a junior role that would actually teach you something new. You are not specialised enough to leap into the senior roles you actually want. So you sit in the middle, doing work that does not stretch you, slowly losing motivation and not understanding why.

Why This Is Especially Common in India

Because Indian families treat degrees as career insurance. The implicit deal is, if something goes wrong, your degrees will save you. So we collect them aggressively. Engineering, MBA, certifications, courses. Each one feels like progress.

But degrees are inputs. Careers are outputs. If you do not have a clear output in mind, more inputs do not help. They just make you more expensively stuck.

On top of that, the Indian job market is full of roles that require credentials but offer no real growth. Big companies hire MBAs to do glorified spreadsheet work. Engineers spend years writing tickets that an LLM could solve in seconds. The credential gets you in the door, and then traps you in a room.

What Most People Do Wrong

They double down on the same playbook that got them stuck. Bored at work? Do another certification. Underutilised? Sign up for an Executive MBA. Stuck in role? Take another online course. They are trying to fix a direction problem with more inputs. It does not work. It just adds more lines to a CV that is already long enough.

Others quietly check out. They stay in the role, do the bare minimum, scroll Instagram in office, and tell themselves this is fine. Five years pass. Now they are 30, even more credentialed, even more bored, and even less able to switch.

What Actually Works

Diagnose the real problem first. Most cases of 'I am underemployed' are actually one of three different problems. First, you are in the wrong company but the right field. Fix is to switch employers, not careers. Second, you are in the wrong role but the right company. Fix is to move internally to a higher leverage team. Third, you are in the right role technically, but the role itself is structurally low-leverage. Fix is to switch fields entirely toward something where your skills compound.

Each diagnosis has a totally different action plan. Treating all three the same is why people stay stuck for years.

Then, ask one uncomfortable question. What am I actually optimising for? Salary, learning, autonomy, prestige, lifestyle, impact. You can have any two strongly. You cannot have all six. People who feel underemployed are usually optimising for none of these clearly. They are just chasing 'more', which is not a direction.

Use Your Credentials Aggressively

If you do have heavy credentials, stop wasting them. Use them as leverage to get into a smaller, faster company where one person actually matters. A 28 year old MBA at a 50 person startup will do work that a 38 year old MBA at a 50,000 person MNC may never get to do. The same degree, used differently, produces a totally different career.

Also remember that credentials decay. An IIT tag matters most in your 20s. Use it when it is at its strongest, not when you are 35 and trying to retroactively cash it in.

Closer

Being overqualified and underemployed is not a credentials problem. It is a clarity problem dressed up in a fancy degree. More credentials will not fix it. Fewer wrong assumptions will. The Indians who eventually escape this trap are the ones who stop adding inputs and start asking, with brutal honesty, what they actually want their work to do for them. Once they get clear on that, the next move stops feeling impossible. It starts feeling obvious.

Read on c3compass.in