From School to Career: Towards A Career Perspective on the Labor Market Returns to Education

Project Information

CAREER

Grant agreement ID: 950189

DOI

10.3030/950189

Project closed

EC signature date 2 December 2020

Start date 1 February 2021

End date 30 April 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 422,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 422,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - CAREER (From School to Career: Towards A Career Perspective on the Labor Market Returns to Education)

Reporting period: 2024-02-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Over the last decades European labor markets have changed rapidly. Wage inequality has increased in virtually all western societies, for a large part between educational groups. Technological change, globalisation, and the automatization of job tasks have changed labor markets: occupations for middle-educated workers are disappearing, while employment at the top and bottom is growing. These changes present societies with a challenge: how should they educate a workforce that is well-prepared for the labor market of the future? Is it still sensible to equip students with a narrow set of occupation-specific skills, given that what is demanded in the labor market is under rapid change? In this project we will investigate how careers of workers with different educational degrees are affected by the changing labor market. By extending the observation window from the early to the full career, CAREER shows how workers with specific or general qualifications perform in rapidly changing labor markets. This will not only enrich our understanding of the link between education and the labor market, it will also inform policy makers on a future-proof education system.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

We have first worked on setting up a theoretical framework, focusing mostly on the different aspects of ideas about vocational and general education effects over the life course. In the different subprojects, the team members have started working on the data analysis. In Subproject 1, we have started working with vacancy texts to analyze labor market change. Because the texts are quite short in contrast to texts that were used in other analyses, new methods were applied in analyzing the data. In the first paper, we mostly focus on describing the labor market, future papers will focus on the change. In Subproject 3, we have analyzed occupational mobility of vocational and general graduates. Here we found that there are differences between them, but on some aspects they were much smaller than expected. In a new working paper the focus is on understanding how the different tasks that vocational and general graduates perform on the job is associated to their life course effects on employment outcomes. In Subproject 4, finally, we have collected interview data with recruiters in IT and HRM in Germany. The first paper is finished, and shows that in recruiting there are different rationales that are used in screening and selecting candidates. Moreover, these effects vary over the life course. We are currently working on the factorial experiment, for which the interviews have been the impetus. These factorial experiments will be fielded in IT and HRM in Germany and the UK, so that we can also bring in the country comparison here.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The results from CAREER will result in two doctoral theses, several articles in international journals, an international conference, and a monograph on how changing labor markets affect the career opportunities of workers with different educational qualifications. Beyond these outcomes, all novel data that are gathered will be shared with the academic community in scientific use files via DANS and the Harvard Dataverse. Finally, all the replication files of the project will be shared via the Open Science Framework. Academic dissemination is also achieved via participation in international conferences. Results from the project have been presented at the meetings of the RC28 on Social Stratification and Mobility, European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR), American Sociological Association (ASA), and the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). Besides academic dissemination, the research team will actively involve policymakers, stakeholders, and the public too.

//Specific output of the workpackges//
SP1 will deliver three academic articles: (1) how did the demand change differently for vocational and general graduates across countries (using repeated cross-sectional data), (2) a methodological article on using online vacancy texts to measure shifts in demand within- and between occupation for a sociological audience ), and (3) a paper on (cross-national or temporal differences in) the within-occupation changes in demand (vacancy data). Moreover, the data collection in SP1 will form the basis of a monograph on changing labor markets and the effects on workers with different educational backgrounds.

SP2 will deliver three academic articles: (1) effects of changing labor markets on vocational and general graduates’ labor market outcomes, (2) effects of within-occupation change in skill demands on vocational and general graduates’ labor market outcomes, and (3) cross-national differences in the effects of changing labor markets on labor market outcomes.

SP3 will deliver three academic articles in the form of a PhD dissertation: (1) career effects of vocational and general education across six European countries, (2) the importance of labor market mobility for understanding vocational career effects, and (3) early career setbacks and long-term effects.

SP4 will deliver three academic articles in the form of a PhD dissertation: (1) Mechanisms for late-career penalty (interviews, factorial experiment), (2) Relative importance of mechanisms (factorial experiment), (3) Organizational and recruiter predictors (factorial experiment, recruiter survey).