Project

Workers make occupational career choices early during their careers and have to consider the consequences of the initial occupational path on mobility and income prospects during their working-life. We use Lazear’s skill-weights approach (2004) to derive hypotheses about the effects of occupation-specific skill combinations acquired during apprenticeship training for different occupations. In our empirical analysis we use a recent German survey that contains data about the educational and occupational career of individual workers as well as extensive information on the skills required at the workplace. Based on an index to measure the specificity degree of different training occupations according to Lazear’s skill-weights approach we study the impact of occupational specificity on occupational mobility and on income prospects of employees.