Technical/professional versus general education, labor market networks and labor market outcomes

Abstract

Does the choice between a general and a technical/professional education determine the quality of the labor market network that an individual will be able to exploit throughout his or her professional life? This paper examines the hypothesis that technical and professional tracks, because they involve fewer students who are in more regular contact with each other and focus on a common, relatively narrow subject, allow students to establish more effective networks to support them in their careers. We test whether the choice of educational track has an impact on the means by which jobs are obtained and on the time to the first job of at least six months, the percentage of time spent in employment later in the career and the earnings when employed later in the career in France. Our results suggest that the educational track determines the means of obtaining a job, but conditional on the manner in which the job was obtained, the track has no additional impact on the outcome variables for the first or later jobs. However, the link between technical/professional education and job obtainment via professional networks does not hold independent of the level of education. In particular, this effect seems pertinent only for students having obtained a professional or technical baccalauréat (relative to a general baccalauréat) or for students having obtained a degree from a “grande école” or engineering school (relative to graduate‐level university studies).

Citation

Margolis, D.N. and Simonnet, V. (2002), "Technical/professional versus general education, labor market networks and labor market outcomes", International Journal of Manpower, Vol. 23 No. 5, pp. 471-492. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437720210450905