Employment-Related Further Training in a Dynamic Labor Market: The Role of Business Cycles and Technological Change

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Accelerated technological progress, increased international competition, and more frequent economic turbulences in the recent decade caused a steadily changing demand for new skills and knowledge. Workers have to continuously invest in human capital to maintain and increase their productivity if they want to avoid long-lasting negative consequences for their careers. To date, existing research provides only little evidence about how dynamic labor markets influence workers' training participation, and how workers' returns to training have evolved facing the economic developments in recent years. The proposed project aims at closing this research gap by analyzing three specific topics that are essential to understand the importance of further training in dynamic labor markets. First, we will merge data from the BERUFENET with NEPS data to analyze how the automatization and digitalization of work processes across different occupations have influenced workers training participation. We will also analyze whether the effects differ by skill group, and how this relationship influences the workers' mobility within and across firms and occupations. Second, we will investigate how economic turbulences, in particular job displacements, influence workers training participation. We will merge highly precise register data to obtain information on job displacements with the NEPS data that contains detailed information about occupation-related further training for both employed and unemployed persons. Third, we add to the literature on returns of further training and explore whether and how much further training increases the stock of human capital. We take advantage of repeated skill measures in the adult cohort of the NEPS and investigate changes in job contents and worker competences following further training activities.