1.1 From Employment to Employability
Transitions from education to work1 were relatively stable for most of the past century, as a consequence of established education and training programs, welfare, labour market systems, and family structures across Europe. Even if the patterns of transitions were different across countries (e.g. a parallel model in Germany or a sequential model in France), similar patterns of transition from education to work were identified in cohorts of young people as “cumulative” experiences (Muller and Gangl 2003).
The change in cultural, social, and economic systems due to globalisation, technological change, and neoliberal policies in Western countries has deeply affected the social life and its values, in a process that has been defined as “detraditionalisation” (Heelas et al. 1996), “individualisation” (Beck and Ritter 1992), and “disembedding” (Giddens 1991). The focus on the “self” has been translated into individual experiences of transitions, depending on either “choice biographies” (Du Bois Reymond 1995) or new patterns of vulnerability and perceptions of uncertainty (Furlong et al. 2003; Wyn and White 1997; Furlong et al. 2006). As Cieslik and Pollock (2002, p. 3) argue: “In place of these collective guides and traditional institutions are much more individualised identities and biographies where individuals have a greater scope beyond traditional markers of class, race, and gender to create complex subjective lifestyles”.
If no new “single model of transition” can be identified, some elements, common among countries, can be identified as follows (Raffe 2011):
- The transition process takes much longer (typically from around age 15 to age 25, OECD 2000).
- In all countries the position of young entrants to the labour market differs from that of adults, and in many respects is less favourable.
- Education plays particular roles in preparing young people for the labour market.
- In all countries, transitions are differentiated and unequal, and different categories of young people have different experiences.
To understand the change in transitions from university to the world of work, the dramatic change of the labour market should be considered first. Since the 1970s, the automatisation of work and other factors have led to a downsizing of the labour market, particularly in manufacturing and construction. Manufacturing in particular was a strong field for Western labour markets, and job loss cumulated during the years of recession (2008–2009). Structural changes affected the market, which has shifted from an industrial society to a knowledge-based economy, driven by technological innovation. This shift involved a radical change in the conception of human resources: mass production and consumption, which required a large number of employees, are no longer central to economic growth, and “knowledge-intensive” companies, based on technological innovation and a highly skilled workforce, have taken the fore (Stewart 2001). According to Drucker (1993), in the “post-capitalist” society “the basic economic resource […] is and will be knowledge” (1993, p. 7), intended as knowledge “for doing”, or knowledge “in action”, after centuries of “knowledge for being”.2 The rise of the ‘knowledge worker’ has dominated the discourse on human capital in recent years. Although a shared definition of this term has not yet been agreed upon, it can generally be said that knowledge workers have as main capital their knowledge, and possess hard and soft skills that allow them to apply knowledge to a task or job. They are able to find, process, handle, and use information within a lifelong process of learning. The impact of the knowledge economy on the labour market, as in other spheres of the individual, has of course been disruptive. As the worker owns the capital, hierarchies and powers are modified (managers vs leaders), centralised organisations become decentralised organisations, sectors become permeable, and companies are not always able to define to which sector they belong (Phillips et al. 2017). The knowledge-based economy offers a great promise that anyone “skilled enough” or smart enough or committed enough can achieve the higher positions in professional settings, with incomes more and more polarised between the “winners” (those who achieve the higher positions) and the “losers” (those who do not) (Brown and Hesketh 2004). The process and its implications became more visible during the years of economic crisis, but the effects on the labour market had already started in the final decades of the twentieth century, when finding or keeping a job was a challenge for many individuals (Rothwell and Rothwell 2017). Also, the nature of jobs has changed from permanent to temporary positions. The ILO report 2019 (World Employment and Social Outlook Trends 2019) highlights how in Northern, Southern, and Western Europe, although with differences from country to country, there is a general shift towards temporary or part-time contracts, with uncertain welfare conditions and social protection and with a certain degree of risk of poverty (2017, p. 51). In 2016, a study for the European Parliament stated that “all employment relationships are at some risk of precariousness” (European Parliament 2016, p. 11), however assigning a higher level of risk to temporary agency and posted work and informal/undeclared work (e.g. zero hours contracts), and a low risk to permanent positions. According to European data, permanent contracts accounted in 2018 for the 85.8% of the working population aged 15–64+, temporary workers accounted for 14.2% of the working population (women share 50%), with remarkable differences between countries (from 26.8% of Spain to 1.6% of Lithuania). Part-time work increased from 14.9% in 2002 to 18.5% in 2018 (Eurostat 2018).
In average, those possessing higher educational attainments have more chances to work in a permanent position (64% versus 48% of low-skilled workers) (European Parliament 2016, elaboration on Eurostat 2014 datasets). However, youths are generally disadvantaged in access to permanent positions, in particular in times of economic crisis (O’Higgins 2012; Michoń 2019; Verd et al. 2019), and are more likely to get low-paid jobs. This also applies to those having completed higher education (OECD 2019).
The share of permanent contracts varies by economic activity: the higher share is observable in manufacturing, public administration, and education, the lower share in the service sector, in which part-time working and seasonal contracts are very common (OECD 2019). Self-employment, including freelancers, is rather common in agriculture, fishery, and forestry (53%), followed by ICT, real estate and financial and professional services (23%), and retail and trade (18%) (European Parliament 2016). It should be noted in respect to these data that “the share of manufacturing value added in overall GDP declined from 20% in 1995 to 16% in 2011 (following a long term trend), ...