Your Salary Won't Rise. Your Value Can.

The average Guatemalan isn't losing purchasing power to inflation. They're stuck in jobs that don't protect them, don't make use of them, and don't help them grow.

Ipsos is a French market research and public opinion company, one of the largest in the world. Every month it asks about 20,000 adults in 30 countries what worries them most. In 2026 the result repeats with uncomfortable consistency: three of the planet's top five worries are economic and personal. Inflation (29%), poverty and inequality (28%), and unemployment (27%). In March, unemployment rose two points and tied with the other two. These aren't the numbers of a country in crisis. They're the world's average.

In Guatemala, the data tells a different story

Here's what's interesting. If you look for the Guatemalan version of that anxiety in prices, you won't find it. The inflation rate closed July 2026 at 2.70%, below the lower bound of the Bank of Guatemala's target. In technical terms, prices are behaving well. So why does the month still feel short?

Because in Guatemala the problem isn't how much things cost. It's the quality of the jobs that pay for them. Data from the INE's National Continuous Employment and Income Survey, for the first quarter of 2026, puts labor informality at 64.9%. Nearly two out of every three employed people work without legal protections. Underemployment reaches 13.6%: people working fewer hours than they need, or in jobs that don't use what they know how to do. And only 20.2% of workers have access to social security.

Translated: the average Guatemalan isn't losing purchasing power to inflation. They're stuck in jobs that don't protect them, don't make use of them, and don't help them grow. That's a different problem. And, unlike inflation, it has an individual way out.

The one variable that actually responds

Inflation doesn't negotiate with anyone. Interest rates, the exchange rate, the tariffs other countries decide to impose on us, whether your industry is hiring: none of those variables respond to your personal effort. You can anticipate them, protect yourself a little. You can't move them.

There is exactly one variable in that equation that responds directly to what you decide to do this year: how much you're worth in the job market. That's the difference between living the economy as something that happens to you and living it as something you can navigate.

What's being repriced right now

When the market tightens, opportunities don't disappear: they concentrate. And they concentrate in profiles with three characteristics.

• Mobility. Someone who only knows how to do their current job is tied to the fortunes of their industry. Someone who masters the fundamentals of management, finance, and operations can move to a different sector when their own cools off. In a volatile economy, mobility is worth more than seniority.
• Financial judgment. Companies stop rewarding whoever executes and start rewarding whoever decides well with scarce resources. Reading a financial statement, defending a budget, judging whether a project truly creates value: that's what separates someone who operates from someone who directs. And in a country where most of the business fabric is small and informal, that judgment is scarce, and therefore expensive.
• The ability to multiply your own work. According to Ipsos's 2026 AI Monitor, 62% of workers across 32 countries say artificial intelligence saved them time in the past year. But the breakdown is what's revealing: among higher-income workers, the figure rises to 70%; among lower-income workers, it drops to 54%. The technology that promised to level the playing field is, for now, widening the gap, because whoever has the training to adopt it adopts it first.

Studying isn't something you do only when you can spare it

There's a widespread, and costly, intuition: that training is for when things are going well. When there's money to spare, when there's time, when the company pays for it. The evidence points in exactly the opposite direction.

In a growing economy, almost anyone gets ahead. In a tight economy, whoever has something the rest don't gets ahead. Hard periods are precisely when the difference between profiles becomes visible and decisive. Postponing your training until things improve means postponing it during the years it would have paid off the most.

This is where we come in

At Grupo Educativo EADE we exist to address exactly this scenario: professionals with real responsibilities, who can't pause their lives to go back to a classroom, but who understand that standing still also has a cost. Our three institutions attack the problem from different angles, depending on where you stand.

EADE Business School specializes in dual-degree programs: a bachelor's and a master's in a single track. For those who don't want to choose between finishing their degree and advancing to the credential that opens doors to leadership, but want to solve both in a single path.

EXEL Business School offers bachelor's degrees with a technology and engineering focus. It's the direct answer to that 70% vs. 54% gap: profiles who master technology don't suffer it, they use it to multiply their output.

Everest Business School offers bachelor's degrees in business administration, human talent management, organizational psychology, and coaching. Because in organizations operating on tight margins, whoever knows how to lead people — not just processes — is the hardest profile to replace.

All of our programs are built on a simple premise: what you learn on Monday should be something you can apply at work on Tuesday. In a country where nearly two-thirds of the workforce is informal, quality training isn't a résumé decoration. It's the most direct mechanism there is for crossing over to the other side.

We can't change your country's economy. We can change your position within it.

About the sources for this article

Ipsos is a market research and public opinion company founded in 1975, headquartered in Paris, with operations in about 90 markets, including Guatemala. Its What Worries the World study is fielded every month in 30 countries among about 20,000 people, using the same question and the same methodology for more than a decade. That is what allows it to say a topic "rose" or is "at its highest level in ten years."

Guatemala's National Statistics Institute (INE) is the official body responsible for the country's public statistics. Its National Continuous Employment and Income Survey (ENEIC) measures employment, unemployment, underemployment, informality, and labor income every quarter.

The Bank of Guatemala (Banguat) is the central bank. It publishes the monthly inflation rate and sets the inflation target used as a reference for monetary policy.

Data cited: Ipsos, What Worries the World, January–August 2026 editions (30 countries). Ipsos AI Monitor 2026 (32 countries). INE, ENEIC first quarter 2026. Banguat and INE, consumer price index, July 2026.