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Transition from school to work is a challenging period for young people with learning difficulties. In the dual vocational system of Switzerland, teachers at vocational educational and training (VET)-schools, as well as trainers at VET companies, provide important support. We were interested in the different pathways from this support to apprentice's career aspirations and further training. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse data from a longitudinal study in four occupational sectors. Results show that VET-teacher support is directly and indirectly related to career aspirations at the end of the apprenticeship, whereas VET-trainer support influences career aspirations only indirectly. Domain specific constructs (ability self-concept at VET-school, skill variety at the VET-company) and self-esteem are important as intermediary variables. Ability self-concept at VET-school had a strong influence on further education three years after the apprenticeship.

This article aims to improve our understanding about why and how individuals' signals of cognitive and noncognitive skills influence labour market outcomes. We study how employers use skills signals when hiring labour market entrants. These demand-side microprocesses are investigated at the apprenticeship market in Germany, which functions as the main entry labour market below tertiary-level education. Qualitative studies and personnel psychology research suggest multistage hiring processes. We concentrate on the first stage at which employers narrow the applicant pools based on written application documents. Their information is limited to applicants' school reports—including their grades (as signals of cognitive skills) and teachers' evaluations of their behaviours (as signals of non-cognitive skills). We conducted two linked field experiments, applying the correspondence test method. Analysing the unbiased employers' responses to randomly varied fictitious applicant profiles enables us to discover whether, and if so how, applicants' skills signals are used as 'screens' at the first selection stage. The experiments reveal that both skills signals are important selection criteria, but employers prefer noncognitive skills signals. Moreover, the findings confirm that firms use thresholds (cut-off values) for selection criteria instead of linear rankings.

School leavers with low educational attainment face great difficulties in their school-to-work transitions. They are, however, quite heterogeneous in terms of their personal and social resources. These within-group differences may influence who shows initiative during the school-to-work transition period and thereby helps employers recognize their learning potential at labor market entry. Yet this recognition also depends on the ways employers select applicants, which may prevent them from discovering such within-group differences. We therefore investigate the interplay between agency and its constraints, that is, whether higher cognitive and noncognitive skills and more parental resources provide low-achieving school leavers with new opportunities in the school-to-work transition period or whether their low school attainment causes the persistency of their disadvantages. We use panel data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), which started in grade 9. The NEPS also includes school leavers from special-needs schools. Our sample consists of 3417 low-achieving adolescents (42% female), defined as adolescents who leave school with no or only a lower secondary school-leaving certificate. Their average school-leaving age is 16 to 17 years. Our key findings are that the transition period opens up new opportunities only for those low-achieving adolescents with better vocational orientation and higher career aspirations, leading them to make stronger application efforts. The success of youth’s initiative varies considerably by school-leaving certificate and school type but not by competences, noncognitive characteristics, and parental background. Thus, the label of “having low qualifications” is a major obstacle in this transition period—especially for the least educated subgroup. Their poor school attainment strongly disadvantages them when accessing the required training to become economically independent and hence in their general transition to adulthood. Our results are also of interest internationally, because participation in firm-based training programs functions as the entry labor market in Germany. Thus, similar explanations may apply to low-achieving adolescents’ difficulties in finding a job.

We investigate to what extent individual transitions to vocational training in Germany have been affected by local labour-market conditions. A statistical decomposition approach is developed and applied, allowing for a systematic differentiation between long-term change, short-term fluctuations, and structural regional differences in labour-market conditions. To study individual-level consequences for transitions to vocational training, regionalized labour-market data are merged with longitudinal data from the National Educational Panel Study, and multivariate transition-rate models are fitted. The results indicate that structural differences between regions have had significant effects on the transition behaviour of school leavers, whereas temporary crises have been of only minor relevance. Moreover, different groups have been affected to different degrees by varying labour-market conditions. We also highlight the usefulness of our decomposition approach for a broader set of applications.

Vocational education and training (VET) programs are typically regarded as the means to enable successful school-to-work transitions. However, high rates of premature contract terminations in VET programs suggest that adolescents face difficulties during this transition. This paper aims to examine the determinants of persistence intention, claiming that persistence intention is a crucial indicator of imminent dropout decisions. The analysis is based on a longitudinal data set of trainees in dual VET programs in Switzerland (n = 1,163) containing two measurement points (before and after the transition from school to VET). Drawing on Social Cognitive Career Theory (Lent & Brown, 2008, 2013), we are interested in the effects of work adjustment indicators, selected characteristics of the vocational choice process, and environmental support before and after the transition on trainees’ persistence intention. We use structural equation modeling to analyze both direct and indirect effects of different predictor variables on persistence intention. The results show significantly positive effects of both occupational self-efficacy and perceived person-vocation fit during the training program on trainees’ persistence intention. Moreover, there are only indirect effects of anticipated person-vocation fit and occupational self-efficacy at the end of compulsory education. Trainees’ relationship with the trainer also has an indirect effect on persistence intention. Social integration in the workplace is both directly and indirectly linked to persistence intention. Overall, the model explains 48% of the variance in persistence intention. Implications for VET programs and future research are discussed.

Purpose: Promoting the labour integration of people with functional diversity is a key element to achieve their social inclusion. This meta-analysis aims to examine the effectiveness of experimental programs in developing employable skills for people with disabilities. Methods: Literature searches up to June 2019 were conducted in four databases (Web of Science, Scopus, PsycINFO and ERIC). Studies that met the following criteria were selected: (1) The program should develop employable skills; (2) the participants should be people with functional diversity; (3) the study should have a design with an experimental group and a control group as well as pretest and posttest measurements; (4) the study had to provide enough data to calculate the effect sizes; and (5) the study had to be written in English or Spanish. 67 independent studies met the selection criteria, among 14 articles published between 1998 and 2019. Results: The results revealed mean effect sizes in favour of the experimental group for the set of all studies according to data reported by people with functional diversity, as well as according their relatives and teachers. The two dimensions of the programs with a significant effect size in favour of the experimental group were interview skills and career planning. Furthermore, it was found that the programs showed a higher degree of effectiveness in groups formed only by people with intellectual disabilities, with a lower educational level, whose duration ranged from six to twelve months. This was particularly the case with participants from Spain and Australia. Conclusion: Promoting the labour insertion of people with disability is a key element to achieve their social inclusion. Programs that support and develop employability and that are conducted upon experimental conditions do have a positive impact upon young people with functional diversity. Upon the results, we discuss practical implications for integrating disabled persons into the labour market. (DIPF/Orig.)

We analyze how life satisfaction changes when adolescents leave school and enter the German vocational and educational training (VET) system. We draw on data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS, Starting Cohort 4) and apply fixed effect regression models. Our findings suggest that leaving school and entering the VET system is associated with an increase in life satisfaction—regardless of the occupational status (i.e., whether the individual is in dual or school-based vocational training or in a vocational preparation program). Moreover, our results provide evidence that adolescents are “happy” to leave school; that having high self-esteem leads to a smaller increase in life satisfaction, and that reaching or failing one’s educational aspirations does not explain changes in life satisfaction.

In this article, we study differences within the group of low-achieving school leavers, asking who among these disadvantaged youth is successful in entering vocational training in Germany, and why. We pay particular attention to the displacement mechanism by investigating under which conditions non-cognitive skills and personality traits are important for finding apprenticeships. Second, we specify how the mechanism of statistical discrimination works with regard to low-achieving youth. We use a unique set of German longitudinal data on school leavers who attended a lower secondary school (Hauptschule). Our main findings are non-cognitive skills, if observable before hiring, have a stronger impact on the training opportunities of less-educated youth than their grades in mathematics and German. Furthermore, extended internships completed while in school—and thus, employers' first-hand experiences with less-educated young persons—increase these youth's training opportunities.

Im Rahmen der Beruflichen Orientierung an Schulen stellen Potenzialanalysen ein zentrales Instrument dar. Programmatisch grenzen sich diese von schulischem Lernen ab und den Jugendlichen soll in diesem Zuge stärkenorientiert begegnet werden. Anhand ethnografischer Befunde zeigt der Beitrag, wie Jugendliche innerhalb des Verfahrens dennoch auf unterschiedliche Weise in der Präsentation eigener Stärken behindert werden können, und reflektiert hiervon ausgehende Implikationen für die Praxis. (DIPF/Orig.) Competency assessments are central to school-based vocational guidance. They claim to be different from school-based learning and young people should be approached in a strengths-oriented manner. Using ethnographic findings, the article shows how young people can nevertheless be disabled in different ways in presenting their own strengths within the process and reflects on implications for practice. (DIPF/Orig.)