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Although there have been significant increases in female representation in several previously male‐dominated occupations, when the occupational structure of the labour force as a whole is considered the changes in segregation have been only marginal. There has been some movement of females into predominantly male occupations, but little movement in the reverse direction. A comparison of the Great Britain Census of Population (using the Classification of Occupations 1970 system) for 1971 and 1981 shows that the overall pattern has changed little during the ten‐year period. Possibly the decade 1981–1991 will see greater changes as the impact of more recent legislation (including the Sexual Discrimination Act) has time to take effect.

This study examines the relationships between parents' and children's occupations to determine the existence of intergenerational transmission of occupations.

To achieve the purpose of the study, four predominant occupational types based on the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO): agriculture and forestry; services and sales; managerial/administrative; and professional/technical are examined using data from the latest (7th) round of the Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS). Two complementary methods involving the correlational analysis and regression-based techniques are used.

The findings indicate the presence of parental influences on children's occupational choices (same-sex and cross-sex) in the Ghanaian labour market, with maternals and same-sector effects having a more substantial influence on children's occupational choices, especially in agriculture and forestry, and services and sales sectors.

The lack of panel data in observing children's occupational choices over time makes it challenging to assume direct causation.

The study is the first to highlight the relative strengths of paternal influence (father's effect) and maternal impact (mother's effect) on sons' and daughters' occupational choices in Africa. The findings have several implications for intergenerational (im)mobility of occupations including how policymakers can make career guidance more effective.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-10-2022-0705

This discussion paper aims to highlight the role of occupational therapy (OT) in understanding stalking and in interventions designed to assist the perpetrator to lead a more fulfilling life through healthier occupations.

This study highlights the role of OT in understanding stalking and in designing interventions to assist the perpetrator by extending discussions, drawing on the authors’ practitioner experiences and upon recent study findings on what drives men who stalk.

Stalking is a problem behaviour that is often effort-intense, all-consuming, emotionally driven and psychologically damaging for both victims and perpetrators. It consists of a patterned occupation of time which is overarchingly dysfunctional, yet intrinsically purposeful. As humans, our actions and occupations have meaning to us. Stalking can be conceptualised as a meaningful yet self-defeating and harmful pattern of occupations. This paper illustrates how stalking could be addressed through the additional contribution of OT to multi-agency approaches.

This paper extends the discussion by drawing on the authors’ clinical practitioner experiences and upon recent study findings on what drives men who stalk.

This paper highlights the role of OT in understanding stalking and in interventions designed to assist the perpetrator to lead a more fulfilling life through healthier occupations.

This marriage of knowledge from OT and stalking research is set out in support of the application of OT within multi-agency approaches to working with people who stalk.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate a method for measuring work activities and skill requirements of 160 occupations in eight countries, used in EurOccupations, an EU‐FP6 project. Additionally, it aims to explore how the internet can be used for measuring work activities and skill requirements.

For the 160 occupations, work activities were described in approximately ten tasks. Occupational experts and jobholders were invited to rate these tasks and to indicate the skill requirements, using a multilingual web‐survey. Experts were recruited through the networks of the project partners and jobholders through frequently visited websites in the eight countries. The effectiveness of the drafting of tasks descriptions, the recruitment of raters, and the measurement of skill requirements is evaluated.

The project showed that tasks descriptions for a wide range of occupations and countries can be drafted relatively easy, using desk research. Conducting a web‐survey with a routing for 160 occupations and eight countries is viable. Recruiting experts used more resources than recruiting jobholders using the internet. Measuring skill requirements would need much more resources due to major variations within and across countries.

The article addresses a number of areas that are potentially worthy of further empirical investigations for a Europe‐wide library of occupational titles, work activities and skill requirements.

The paper outlines the potential of a future method for a European library of work activities and skill requirements for occupational titles, thereby facilitating European industrial training efforts.

Insight in the work activities and skill requirements of occupations will facilitate labour mobility and related training across EU member states.

This paper explores the potential for a Europe‐wide empirical underpinning of work activities and skill requirements, using a web‐survey and the internet.

This study aims to address the question of why organizations do not uniformly apply pay for performance (PFP) throughout the organization, focusing on the wider occupational structure in which they and the jobs they create are embedded. The authors propose a model of “occupational differentiation” whereby the probability of a job within a given organization having PFP increases with the levels of monitoring difficulty and requisite human asset specificity characterizing the occupation to which a job belongs, being highest in occupations characterized by high levels of both (generally managerial and professional occupations).

Using the Workplace Employment Relations Survey (a nationally representative matched employer–employee dataset for Britain), this paper investigates this question for all 350 occupations delineated by the UK's Office for National Statistics using regression methods that adjust for other confounding factors such as demographic factors and workplace fixed effects.

The authors find organizations “occupationally differentiate” the use of PFP in ways consistent with the model, i.e. PFP is most likely to be found in occupations characterized by both high monitoring difficulty and high requisite human asset specificity (mainly managerial and professional occupations) and least likely in occupations scoring low in both. The finding holds across PFP types (individual, group, organizational), whether organizations are large or small, and hold across most industrial sectors.

The main implication of this study is that organizations appear to be taking into consideration whether the wider profession to which a job belongs when implementing PFP, irrespective of their own human resource management strategies and organizational context. There are a few limitations to this study, with the main one being that this model is mainly confined to empirical support is only found in the private sector. The public sector appears to be beyond the reach of the model, where PFP implementation is generally rarer. A second limitation is that the dataset is from 2011 and only covers a single country.

Given organizations appear to be implementing PFP based on occupation, this may lead to equity concerns, as different groups are being treated differently within organizations based upon their occupational group.

As PFP jobs tend to pay more than non-PFP jobs and PFP prevalence has been growing, by being more likely to implement it for generally high-paid groups (generally higher managerial and professional occupations), PFP may contribute to wider pay differentials within and between organizations.

By introducing the occupational-level of analysis and the differential nature of tasks across occupational groups, the model offers a new midrange, sociological perspective to understanding intra-organizational dynamics in PFP use and potentially human resource practices more broadly.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of family, individual difference and cultural factors on the choice of gender‐dominated occupations among female students in some tertiary institutions.

A field‐based survey approach was adopted to collect quantitative data through the means of questionnaires from 340 female students randomly selected from tertiary institutions in Southwest Nigeria.

Hierarchical multiple‐regression statistical analysis employed revealed that family, individual differences and cultural factors were good predictors (collectively and independently) of choice of gender‐dominated occupations of female students.

These findings were limited to nursing and engineering professions as well as variables investigated. Thus, future researchers should make efforts to extend the study's scope to other professions that could be categorized as gender‐dominated occupations.

The findings provide evidence on the factors influencing the choice of gender‐dominated occupations among female students. Hence, attention should be paid to the predicting variables investigated in that they provided significant basis for this study. These predicting variables could assist the female students in making realistic and purposeful career choices, so that they could overcome the barriers of occupational stereotyping in Nigerian society. This would enable the women to contribute their quota to their families and society in general.

As the shortage in the information technology (IT) workforce continues, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the cultural dimensions of IT occupations that attract or drive away potential IT professionals. In the present study, the authors take an occupational culture approach to study the cultural fit of newcomers to IT occupations and to understand how young people perceive the culture embedded in this occupational community as they become part of it.

The authors take a sequential mixed methodology approach composed of two phases, one qualitative and the other quantitative. In the first phase of the study, nine focus groups and 27 interviews with college students were conducted to learn about the challenges and barriers that they personally experienced while becoming part of the IT occupational community. The second phase used results from the first qualitative phase to design a survey instrument that was administered to 215 IT college students who were currently or had recently been involved in IT work experience to evaluate their cultural fit to the IT occupational culture (ITOC) and its influence on their occupational commitment.

The results suggest that women, ethnic minorities and those with less work experience encountered greater difficulty fitting into different dimensions of ITOC. The results also showed that cultural fit is a good predictor of occupational commitment and affective commitment in particular.

An initial survey instrument was developed to measure cultural fit to ITOC. This instrument can be further modified and adapted to be used in the hiring process by HR departments to measure cultural fit to organizational subcultures, such as the one in the IT occupational group.

This paper constitutes an important contribution to the rigor and development of the theory and research of human resources in information technologies.

Information on job openings by occupation is important for those looking for jobs, for those contemplating education and training options and for policy makers in education and training. Job openings in an occupation are a result of employment growth and the replacement of workers who leave the occupation. In this paper, three concepts of replacement demand are outlined and net replacement demand is estimated and projected for 81 occupational groups, covering the whole of employment in Australia. The results show the net replacement demand rate to vary substantially across occupations, with an average annual rate of 2 per cent.

To compare the experience of occupational stress across a large and diverse set of occupations. Three stress related variables (psychological well‐being, physical health and job satisfaction) are discussed and comparisons are made between 26 different occupations on each of these measures. The relationship between physical and psychological stress and job satisfaction at an occupational level is also explored.Design/methodology/approach – The measurement tool used is a short stress evaluation tool which provides information on a number of work related stressors and stress outcomes. Out of the full ASSET database 26 occupations were selected for inclusion in this paper.Findings – Six occupations are reporting worse than average scores on each of the factors – physical health, psychological well‐being and job satisfaction (ambulance workers, teachers, social services, customer services – call centres, prison officers and police). Differences across and within occupational groups, for example, teaching and policing, are detailed. The high emotional labour associated with the high stress jobs is discussed as a potential causal factor.Research limitations/implications – This is not an exhaustive list of occupations and only concerns employees working within the UK.Originality/value – There is little information available that shows the relative values of stress across different occupations, which would enable the direct comparison of stress levels. This paper reports the rank order of 26 different occupations on stress and job satisfaction levels.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate linkages in US labor market between importance of specific skills, education, or training requirements, and private average salary for occupations not characterized as requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Data set constructed that matches 474 less than bachelor’s occupations to private average salary, education, or training requirements category, and 35 specific skills. Statistical and regression analysis has been done to assess linkages between these variables.

Highest returns associated with cognitive skills, quantitative skills, and other core academic basic skills set followed by traditional blue-collar technical skills. Interpersonal skills and related social skills set exhibited weak, and sometimes negative, association with private average salary by occupation.

Study of only US labor market at single point of time, findings may not generalize to either non US markets or occupations requiring bachelor’s degree or higher.

Workers in the less than bachelor’s labor market have greater upside salary potential if they obtain postsecondary certificates or associates’ degrees and target occupations placing a greater importance on cognitive skills, quantitative skills, and core academic basic skills than if they target traditional blue-collar technical skill occupations.

Social policies to enhance earnings for workers lacking bachelor’s degrees must target improving core generic transferable academic skills as well as vocationally specific training.

This if the first study that links these many specific skills to salary variation across less than bachelor’s occupations.