Understanding the European Transition from School to Work

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This essay analyses the article Changing Labour Markets and Early Career Outcomes: Labour Market Entry in Europe over the Past Decade written by Markus Gangl. In much of the Western Europe countries, youth unemployment rose in the 1980s and remained high in the 1990s. Many young workers waited long time before they found jobs and “remained living with their parents longer and longer” (Blancheflower, 2000: 4). The youth unemployment and market entrants transition problems from school to work have become phenomena. According to these social processes, Gangl’s research is conducted to develop framework for understanding these transitions from school to work in different European countries and to use this framework to analyse the factors affecting success and failure in education and training outcomes and labour market integration.

The main objective of this study is to explain differences amongst individuals with various level of education and differences amongst countries’ systems and find out and describe how these differences affect the young people’s transitions from full-time education into the labour market. Gangl identifies main trends such as long-term trend of educational expansion, the changing occupational structure and changing size of youth cohort and how these trends are affected by economic context conditions and might have a different impact among the leaver groups and thus affecting the nature of social stratification (seeing as unemployment risk and occupational allocation) in the short or medium term. As is typical for quantitative research, author’s theoretical discussion, based on classic market labour theory, deductively leads to the following hypothetical effects for each of the four trends; H1: Increasing une...

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...ex of the occupation of the head of the household in which respondent lived until his 18 (Duncan, 1961 in Porter, 1976:25). Nevertheless the study is highly professional it would be more coherent if the structural variables have been related to the socio-psychological variables as well.

Regarding to Blancheflower (2000:4), the youth proportion of the workeforce declined sizably therefore declining youth cohort size should lead to lower unemployment rates for youth and higher relative earnings for youth but the economic position of youths worsened rather than improved. If the change of youth cohort size has no effects on youth unemployment, it is more useful, if Gangl has considered other measurable variables with more significant effects such as technological changes or increased trade with less developed countries with huge number of young, less skilled workers.

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