Thus, the survey is voluntary, continuous, and multi-country.5 It contains detailed questions about, for example, education, occupation, skill mismatch, industry, country of birth, country of birth of parents, and, in some countries, ethnic group.
What about all those studies showing that employment fell broadly across sectors and regions, indeed across occupations and skill classes, all of which is inconsistent with this story?
The current wave, characterised by automation becoming smarter, machine-to-machine communication, artificial intelligence and continued technological improvements – and otherwise described at the fourth industrial revolution – still brings uncertainty and threatens a broader range of occupations and skill levels.
Only two of the men worked part-time, whereas only four of the women worked fulltime, in a diversity of occupations and skill levels (Table 1).
This is in contrast to a common approach in the literature which maps occupations into skills first, and then skills into years of education (using, for example, the GED scale).
In any case, occupational skills in combination with practical experience prepare IVET graduates for entering employment in the corresponding occupation, but broad training might allow for greater occupational mobility than specific trainings as the provided skills are more general and thus the loss of occupation-specific skills when switching occupations might be smaller (Eggenberger et al. 2015).
If occupation-specific skill demand is high, despite the competition with more experienced job seekers IVET graduates can be expected to find a skilled job within the occupation for which they trained.
What about all the other things we talk about, like the variation of unemployment across regions or occupations or skills?
Large job losses in 2008-9 widespreadpreacrossoss industries, locations, occupations and skills, and in keeping with the standard pattern of recessions, highly cyclical industries were particularly hard hit.
Many expatriate miners, especially Chinese, eventually move into other occupations, spreading skills, contacts and capital more widely.
