Vocational Education and Employment over the Life Cycle

By A. Forster, Thijs Bol, H. G. van de Werfhorst. 2016

121 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Vocationally educated individuals often find employment sooner after school than those with a general educational qualification. A recent study has argued that the higher employment probability associated with a vocational qualification reverses in later life. The main explanation is that although having (occupation-)specific skills is an advantage when entering the labor market, specific skills also make the vocationally educated less flexible. This life cycle effect is hypothesized to be especially strong in countries where the vocational system provides highly occupation-specific skills. We test these two hypotheses on cross-national data from PIAAC 2012. Using logistic regressions with country fixed effects, we find that individuals with a vocational qualification have a higher employment probability than those with a general qualification at the start of their career, but this pattern reverses in later life. In contrast to earlier findings, we do not find that this effect varies systematically across countries with different vocational educational systems.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51578bef72b75e7153a59a296f6cc6c33e8b1bce

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In Demography

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In General Health Professions

Citations in the corpus

School-to-Work Linkages in the United States, Germany, and France1 (2017, background): “Given the extent to which employment rates fluctuate across countries in response to variations in social insurance systems and macroeconomic conditions as well as skill distributions, we view their conclusion as premature (Forster et al. 2016).”