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This paper aims to highlight the relevance of examining education and skill job‐worker mismatches as two different, although simultaneous, phenomena of the labor market. Most previous literature does not take into account skill mismatch, and a number of papers deal with both kinds of mismatches as equivalent.

Spanish data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) survey for the year 2001 are used to examine the degree of statistical association between both education and skill mismatches, and to estimate wage equations as well as job satisfaction equations, considering satisfaction with pay, with the type of job and overall job satisfaction, in order to analyze the consequences of both types of mismatches from the workers’ viewpoint.

The statistical analysis shows that education and skill mismatches are weakly related in the Spanish labor market. The econometric analysis reveals that skill mismatches appear as key determinants of workers’ job satisfaction, while education mismatches have much weaker impacts, if any, on workers’ job satisfaction; however, both skill and education mismatches have negative impacts on wages.

The analysis points out that the research strategy that considers education mismatch as a proxy for the study of the effects of skill mismatch is rather weak because skill and education mismatches appear to capture different aspects of the accuracy of the job‐worker pairing, and, therefore, they have separate consequences for workers, both in monetary and non‐monetary terms. Skill mismatches are perceived by workers as a much more relevant problem than education mismatches. The wage and job satisfaction consequences of skill mismatches are strongly negative; to the contrary, education mismatches show much weaker effects.

The paper emphasizes that neglecting the effects of skill mismatch along with those of education mismatch in the analysis of the monetary and non‐monetary consequences of inadequate job‐worker pairing can lead to erroneous interpretations of the facts.

Proposes a new empirical approach to the classification of job families. This approach reflects an attempt to incorporate data on both the performance‐related human attributes and the nature of work or performance itself in developing a job‐classification system. Employees′ technical or functional skills and career histories form the basis of this rational taxonomy system. Demonstrates step‐by‐step, with the human resource data in a large, complex organization, how a useful taxonomy of job families may be derived from these two types of qualification‐related data.

Skilled migrant (SM) women play a key role in developed countries especially in healthcare and education in easing staffing shortages and migrate expecting to gain qualification-matched employment (QME). The aim of this review is to assess whether SM women gain the anticipated QME, equitably compared to their skilled counterparts and to examine why and how they do so.

I conducted a systematic literature review to derive empirical studies to assess if, why and how SM women achieve QME (1) using SM women-only samples and comparative samples including SM women, and (2) examining whether they gain QME directly on or soon after migration or indirectly over time through undertaking alternative, contingent paths.

Only a minority of SM women achieve the anticipated QME directly soon after migration and less often than their skilled counterparts. Explaining the mechanism for achieving QME, other women, especially due to having young families, indirectly undertake alternative, lower-level contingent paths enabling them to ascend later to QME.

The SM literature gains new knowledge from revealing how SM women can gain positions post-migration comparable to their pre-migration qualifications through undertaking the alternative, contingent paths of steppingstone jobs and academic study, especially as part of agreed familial strategies. This review results in a theoretical mechanism (mediation by a developmental contingency path) to provide an alternative mechanism by which SM women achieve QME.

Utilizing work task data drawn from the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills of 2011–2012 and 2014–2015, we derive a new skills-based indicator of graduate jobs, termed ISCO(HE)2008, for 31 countries. The indicator generates a plausible distribution of graduate occupations and explains graduates’ wages and job satisfaction better than hitherto existing indicators. Unlike with the traditional classifier, several jobs in major group 3 “Technicians and Associate Professionals” require higher education in many countries. Altogether, almost a third of labor is deployed in graduate jobs in the 31 countries, but with large cross-national differences. Industry and establishment-size composition can account for some of the variation. In addition, two indicators of the relative quality of the higher education system also contribute to the variation in the prevalence of graduate jobs across countries.

The impetus for this paper was the recognition, based on recent surveys and our own experiences, that organizations face special challenges when designing and validating selection procedures for information technology (IT) workers. The history of the IT industry, the nature of IT work, and characteristics of IT workers converge to make the selection of IT workers uniquely challenging. In this paper, we identify these challenges and suggest means of addressing them. We show the advantages offered by the modern view of validation that endorses a wide spectrum of probative information relevant to establishing the job relatedness and business necessity of IT selection procedures. Finally, we identify the implications of these issues for industrial/organizational psychologists, human resource managers, and managers of IT workers.

Economists and sociologists have proposed arguments for why there can exist wage penalties for work involving helping and caring for others, penalties borne disproportionately by women. Evidence on wage penalties is neither abundant nor compelling. We examine wage differentials associated with caring jobs using multiple years of Current Population Survey (CPS) earnings files matched to O*NET job descriptors that provide continuous measures of “assisting & caring” and “concern” for others across all occupations. This approach differs from prior studies that assume occupations either do or do not require a high level of caring. Cross-section and longitudinal analyses are used to examine wage differences associated with the level of caring, conditioned on worker, location, and job attributes. Wage level estimates suggest substantive caring penalties, particularly among men. Longitudinal estimates based on wage changes among job switchers indicate smaller wage penalties, our preferred estimate being a 2% wage penalty resulting from a one standard deviation increase in our caring index. We find little difference in caring wage gaps across the earnings distribution. Measuring mean levels of caring across the U.S. labor market over nearly thirty years, we find a steady upward trend, but overall changes are small and there is no evidence of convergence between women and men.

A leading explanation for the growth of wage inequality is that greater use of information technology increased the demand for human capital. This paper identifies four different explanations for the relationships between computers, skills, and wages: computer-specific human capital, greater general human capital among computer users, greater general human capital for both users and nonusers due to contextual effects, and skill-biased changes in the job composition of the workforce. The paper tests the first three explanations and finds little support for them once pre-computer and other job characteristics are adequately controlled. This conclusion receives further support from a comparison of the timing of inequality growth and computer diffusion and from analyses of the contribution of computer use to overall inequality growth using DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux's (1996) reweighting standardization technique.

I use data from employers and longitudinal data from former/current recipients covering the period 1997 to early 2004 to analyze the relationship between job skills, job changes, and the evolution of wages. I analyze the effects of job skill requirements on starting wages, on-the-job training opportunities, wage growth prospects, and job turnover. The results show that jobs of different skill requirements differ in their prospects for earnings growth, independent of the workers who fill these jobs. Furthermore, these differences in wage growth opportunities across jobs are important determinants of workers’ quit propensities (explicitly controlling for unobserved worker heterogeneity). The determinants and consequences of job dynamics are investigated. The results using a multiplicity of methods, including the estimation of a multinomial endogenous switching model of wage growth, show that job changes, continuity of work involvement, and the use of cognitive skills are all critical components of the content of work experience that leads to upward mobility. The results underscore the sensitivity of recipients’ job transition patterns to changes in labor market demand conditions.

Human capital theory hypothesizes that no firm rationally invests in general job skills training because its competitors might hire the trained employees away before the firm could recoup its costs through higher worker productivity. Drawing from four explanatory perspectives, we developed several research hypotheses about the organizational and environmental sources of variation in company-provided job skills training for core employees, which we tested with a national sample of U.S. work establishments. Contrary to human capital theory expectations, the large majority of employers with core training programs reported providing skills that were either “to a great deal” or “to some extent” useful to other employers. Our general skills training analysis supported only one hypothesis, suggesting the inadequacy of human capital theory for explaining company training investments. We found evidence that the substantive contents of company job skills training programs differentiated into technical skills and social skills dimensions. Multivariate equations supported several hypothesized effects of organizational and environmental factors on the social and technical skills contents of company core training investments. We conclude with a reassessment of the classic general-specific job skills hypothesis and speculate about future directions for job skills training theory and research.

This study aims to examine the effect of firm-specific skills on formal and informal training and development (T&D) effectiveness, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and the moderating effect of job tenure on each hypothesized path. The authors adopt a micro perspective on human capital, arguing its significance to examine the role of job attitudes in developing firm-specific skills.

A total of 1,514 South Korean workers' responses were obtained from the Human Capital Corporate Panel dataset. This study conducted structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the structural relationships between the study variables. A subsequent multigroup SEM was conducted to determine whether the structural model differed across job tenures by comparing the results for employees with more than and less than six years of tenure.

The findings indicate that (a) firm-specific skills have a negative effect on formal T&D effectiveness and no significant effect on informal T&D effectiveness; (b) firm-specific skills have a negative effect on job satisfaction and no significant effect on turnover intentions; (c) formal T&D effectiveness has a positive effect on job satisfaction and a negative effect on turnover intentions; (d) informal T&D effectiveness has a positive effect on job satisfaction and no significant effect on turnover intentions; and (e) job tenure partially moderates the relationships among the proposed study variables.

The study's findings provide new insights into human capital theory, focusing on whether firm-specific skills can be a source of sustained competitive advantage from employees' perspectives.