How have immediate school-to-work transitions and early careers changed in different labor market entry regimes since the early 1980s? How do institutional frameworks differ with regard to insecurity perception? This book investigates these topics from a cross-national perspective while focusing on Denmark, the darling of flexicurity literature. The results show that in all the labor market entry regimes, the school-to-work transition has become increasingly difficult, and flexible forms of work are more typical in the first job. Furthermore, the liberal institutional framework of the United States seems to produce a similarly low degree of job-loss worry among young people in their early careers as does the Danish paradigm. Contents include: employment flexibilization and increasing economic insecurity at labor market entry * the role of institutional settings for shaping school-to-work transitions * the Danish flexicurity as a framework for labor market entry processes * insecurity experiences: the development of employment risks at labor market entry since the 1980s * insecurity perception: the translation of unemployment risks into job-loss worry in times of flexible employment.

Stage 6 of the German National Educational Panel Study is devoted to youth’s transitions from school into the labor market. In all Western societies, vocational education and training (VET) systems face a number of challenges, including the need to adapt to increasing skill requirements across the economy and handle the danger of producing an “underclass” of low-skilled youth. This chapter presents the life-course approach for investigating school-leavers’ pathways from school into the labor market within the National Educational Panel Study. Several factors shape young people’s school-to-work transitions: their motivation and competence endowment, their decisions concerning further course of education, the constraints they face both concerning opportunities for VET and gatekeepers’ recruitment behavior, the information and support youths may or may not receive from social networks, and the learning environments they encounter in firms and schools. We shall outline the basic theories that will guide our research concerning these influences and discuss how they are taken into account within stage 6 of the National Educational Panel Study. Thus, we will give a picture of the study’s research potential in the area of VET.

ABSTRACT

Continuous full-time work is becoming less frequent in modern societies. Instead, flexible forms of employment such as part-time work, fixed-term contracts, and self-employment as well as phases of unemployment are gaining importance. These trends are supposed to be more pronounced at labor market entry, leading to a longer entry process and increasing difficulties in becoming established in the labor market. However, there are vast differences between countries with regard to forms of labor market flexibility and the degree of uncertainty faced by young people. This working paper provides a theoretical framework for the empirical studies within the flexCAREER research program. The aim of flexCAREER is to study the consequences of employment flexibility strategies on labor market entries and early careers as well as their impact on structures of social inequality in a cross-country perspective. We explain the reasons behind the rise in employment flexibility and develop hypotheses with special regard to nation-based institutional differences. In particular, we describe what role institutions such as the education system, employment relations, and welfare regimes play in determining the consequences of employment flexibility strategies. We focus on the institutional contexts of Great Britain, the USA, Germany (East and West), the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, and Hungary; these are the countries under study within the project. The hypotheses in this working paper concern the following aspects: 1) the phase of labor market entry in terms of a) the duration of search for the first job and b) the quality of this first job (with regard to the flexibility of the employment contract and the ‘adequacy’ of the job with respect to the employee’s educational qualification). 2) In view of the early career we outline our expectations in terms of a) the risk of unemployment, b) the chances of reentering the labor force when unemployed (e.g., with regard to the duration of unemployment until finding a new job), c) upward and downward mobility, d) the chances of leaving precarious work at the beginning of the career, and e) the risk of making a transition into a precarious form of employment. 1 Flexibility processes and social inequalities at labor market entry and