The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent industry representatives deem employees' readiness as satisfactory for the implementation of Industry 4.0 elements, to determine how the availability of related positions in the market is perceived and, on that basis, to identify the implications for the education system in terms of structure…

Evidence on gender inequality in the labor market is extensive. However, little is known about the potential role of overeducation and horizontal mismatch in explaining women's labor-market disadvantages. We draw on recent data from the Eurograduate pilot survey to investigate the role of overeducation, field-of-study mismatch and field-specific…

Utilizing the Survey of Adult Skills from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and the OECD database, this study investigates the role of gender inequality and public social spending in the gender gap in Not in Employment, Education, or Training (NEET) risk across various age cohorts. The research identifies a…

This paper compares within-country programmes of initial vocational education and training (IVET) in Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany and their outcomes. Specifically, it aims to analyse and compare the labour market success of graduates of different tracks at the ISCED 3 level in both early and later stages of their careers. The comparison…

This paper presents one of the first cross-nationally comparative studies on the economic and social returns to grit (perseverance and passion for long-term goals). Specifically, we investigated whether grit incrementally predicted objective (income) and subjective (job satisfaction) career success over and above cognitive skills and educational…

This article explores cross-country patterns in how conditions relating to family background, education, and the labor market are related to literacy and numeracy skills. It seeks to assess whether these patterns are in agreement with models of skills formation as identified in the political economy literature. The novelty of this article resides…

This study explores the role of the welfare state in reducing young people not being in education, employment, or training (NEET)s across 15 European countries. Using data from the Survey of Adult Skills in the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in combination with the Social Expenditure Database, we conducted…

Context: Existing studies have explored the association between workplace training and wages suggesting that training participation may have a positive association with wages. However, we still know very little about whether this association varies between men and women. Through its potential positive association with wages, training may balance…

The paper focuses on dual-career academic couples, how they combine careers and parenthood and how their strategies translate into employment pathways of researchers, and especially women researchers. Based on sixteen in-depth interviews with dual-career academic couples, the analysis identified two types of partnerships which differed in terms of…

The drivers of learning for mid-career workers with few initial qualifications from the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Italy and Poland are examined. The focus in this article is upon the learning pathways and experience of the low-qualified drawn from empirical research which gathered and analysed the strategic career and…

This article analyses online job advertisements to identify skills that are demanded in selected low- and medium-skilled occupations. We explore data from the publicly administered cross-European EURES job search portal and quantify the different cognitive and non-cognitive skills requested by employers in small European economies. While we find…

Nowadays, women outperform men in educational attainment in many countries. Still, large variation between countries remains. Emancipatory contexts in which individuals are raised might explain these differences in male-female educational attainment, both over time and across countries. This study examines individual and contextual factors that…

Individuals who pass through low-skilled work in their careers can represent this phase as showing strength of character as obstacles are overcome. However, continuing to work in low-skilled employment has so many negative consequences that finding ways to assist those individuals' career development is an important challenge for guidance policy…

Ample evidence indicates that a person's human capital is important for success on the labor market in terms of both wages and employment prospects. However, unlike the efforts to identify the impact of school attainment on labor-market outcomes, the literature on returns to cognitive skills has not yet provided convincing evidence that the…

The lifelong learning system in the Czech Republic and Slovakia share some common traits: traditional model with the dominant role of the initial education, low participation rates, lack of incentives and fragmentation. The results of the narrative research on 15 low-skilled persons demonstrated that negative attitudes towards education are often…