Demand for Work Experience and Labor Market Entry After Completion of Vocational Education and Training

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Abstract

Employers frequently ask for prior work experience when recruiting new staff. For labor market entrants, this might be a potential stumbling block when attempting to find the first job. This paper thus examines how labor market entrants’ job opportunities, jointly defined by the length of the job queue and the ranking significance of work experience in the labor queue, affect the duration of labor market entry. The analyses are conducted for VET graduates in Switzerland, a country known for its wide-spread vocational education and training (VET) and strong occupation-specific segmentation of the labor market. The longitudinal Swiss Survey of Children and Youth (COCON) provides information on the occupation-specific VET credentials and characteristics of first job. VET graduates’ job opportunities are measured at the individual level with data of the Swiss Job Market Monitor (SJMM), a representative sample of job advertisements published in the press and online. Our results, based on a Cox-regression, provide evidence that a high potential of accessible vacancies (i.e., individual job opportunities) leads to the shortest duration of labor market entry.

Authors

• Marlis C. Buchmann, University of Zurich

• Marianne Mueller, University of Zurich