Finding compromises and its consequences - path dependencies between occupational choice, educational decisions, and training pathways

该项目调查了从学校过渡的职业选择过程及其对学校后教育的接受和进展的影响。职业选择和相关教育决策的过程是青少年发展的重要步骤；与此同时，培训职业为他们未来的职业生涯奠定了基础。在德国，职业在塑造向就业的过渡和（再）产生社会不平等方面发挥着关键作用。然而，在教育扩张和结构性劳动力市场变化的过程中，德国的教育路径发生了深刻的变化。除了这些趋势外，还观察到培训市场上质量不匹配的增加。在这种背景下，这种失衡如何发展是一个关键问题。以前的研究在这个问题上只提供有限的信息。到目前为止，有许多关于学校到工作过渡的单一方面的研究，如职业选择、教育决策、进入学校后教育和培训辍学，但它们在概念、理论和实证方法方面广泛孤立。也由于缺乏适当的纵向数据，几乎没有采用动态的观点，这种观点考虑到职业选择、在过渡期间作出的决定及其修订是过渡过程中连续的步骤。拟议的项目旨在通过从纵向角度产生关于供应方机制的基本知识来缩小这些研究差距，这有助于解释培训和毕业后教育中的质量匹配问题。为此，我们将重点关注从学校过渡的职业选择过程，并探讨其在过渡到学校后教育及其进一步发展方面的路径依赖。我们的主要问题是：在完成学业之前，青少年如何使他们的职业和教育愿望适应周围环境的期望和培训市场的现实？这些妥协对他们的继续教育和培训生涯有什么影响？社会分层，特别是关于社会背景的，是如何影响这一过程的？这种影响是如何在过渡过程中发展的？为了回答这些问题，我们使用国家教育小组研究（NEPS）的纵向数据，开始队列4，调查九年级学生的职业生涯。我们从官方统计数据中获取有关培训职业的结构性信息，丰富了这些数据。这使我们能够研究青少年对职业领域的偏好，他们在某些方面做出妥协的意愿，例如收入前景或工作保障，职业愿望与培训职业之间的匹配质量，以及这些参数对进一步教育职业的影响。

The project investigates the process of occupational choice in the transition from school and its consequences for take-up and progress of post-school education. Processes of occupational choice and connected educational decisions are important steps in adolescents' development; at the same time, training occupations set the course for their further careers. In Germany, occupations play a key role in shaping the transition to employment and in (re-)producing social inequality. However, educational pathways in Germany have profoundly changed in the course of educational expansion and structural labour market change. Alongside these trends an increase of qualitative mismatch on the training market has been observed.Against this background it is a crucial question how such imbalances may develop. Previous research provides only limited information on this issue. So far, there are many studies on single aspects of school-to-work transitions, such as occupational choices, educational decisions, entries into post-school education, and training dropouts, but they are widely isolated in terms of their conceptual, theoretical, and empirical approaches. What has hardly been applied - also due to a lack of appropriate longitudinal data - is a dynamic perspective, which takes into account the fact that occupational choices, decisions taken during transitions, and their revision are consecutive steps in the transition process. The proposed project aims at closing these research gaps by generating basic knowledge from a longitudinal perspective about supply-side mechanisms, which contribute to explain qualitative matching problems in training and post-school education. To this end, we focus on the process of occupational choice in the transition from school and explore its path dependencies with regard to transitions to post-school education and their further progress. Our main questions are: How do adolescents adapt their occupational and educational aspirations to the expectations of their surroundings and to the realities of the training market before finishing school? Which consequences do these compromises have for their further education and training careers? How does social stratification, particular with regard to social background, affect this process and how does this influence develop over the transition process? To answer these questions, we use longitudinal data of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), Starting Cohort 4, to investigate the careers of ninth-grade students. We enrich these data with structural information on training occupations taken from official statistics. This enables us to examine adolescents' preferences for occupational fields, their willingness to make compromises in certain dimensions, such as income prospects or job security, the quality of the match between occupational aspiration and training occupation, and the consequences of these parameters for further educational careers.