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I don't know why they made up a new word for this or why they think it is different from underemployment. From wiktionary definition of underemployed: "Employed in a job for which one is overqualified" http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/underemployed

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I've always understood "underemployment" to mean working part-time when you want to work full-time.

I've seen it used for both situations.

I suppose that depends on what you mean by "overqualified". I'm a computer programmer, and let's say I lost my job and started looking for a job in construction. I've never worked in construction before and while I'm not out-of-shape I'm not exactly ready for heavy-lifting.

So am I overqualified or underqualified? Or both?

That's easy. You are a construction apprentice and therefore, neither over nor under-qualified.

I would think of it like this- If the job on paper requires you to be a high school graduate, you're overqualified because you have education beyond high school. If the job requires vocational training/certification/licenses/experience etc, that's a different story. The fact that you wouldn't be that good at the job in practice doesn't mean you're not overqualified.

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