In 1979 he entered Spanish Radio and Television Corporation by state exam for upper-level university graduates, initially as a technologist, and subsequently as deputy director of the Audience Research cabinet.

In 1979 he was appointed Assistant Director-General of the Technical Cabinet of Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), the Spanish agency for sociological research, a body that reported to the Presidency of the Government.

In July 2011, the Congress of Deputies passed a motion calling for the withdrawal of funds for the Biographical Spanish Dictionary if the failures were not corrected effectively.

A month before, the Spanish Royal Academy of History had been forced to create a commission to report possible errors; but on 26 May 2012, according to El País, the academy decided (without revealing the conclusions of its commission) not to either correct any biography or write alternative biographies to the ones already published, and that there would be only minor changes in a final addendum, and that there would be no modifications to the online version.

On 31 January 2012, José Ignacio Wert announced that the subject Education for Citizenship, which was severely criticized by the Catholic Church and by the Partido Popular itself, would be replaced by another subject, called Civil and Constitutional education that, according to the minister, would be "free of controversial issues" and won't be "capable of any ideological recruitment".

According to El País, the new contents elude homophobia and social inequalities, but include denunciations of the so-called "exclusionary nationalism".

Furthermore, the new contents emphasize the importance of private economic activity as a factor "in the creation of wealth", and also promote the respect for "intellectual property".

[13] The objective of the measures is, according to Wert, to reduce the education costs to meet the deficit target set by the European Union.

Other measures include the increase in the number of teaching hours (added to the cuts in teachers' salaries decreed by most of the autonomous communities); the decision of not covering sick leave that lasts less than 15 days, and a raise in university fees.