Transitional labour markets (TLMs) aim at fostering individual employability over a person's life course under the conditions of flexible labour markets. For TLM policies it is therefore necessary to focus not on single transitions or points of time but on transitional periods. Such a period can contain more than one single transition and add up to an overall sequence type. In particular, the process of labour market entry is characterised by considerable insecurity and varies in duration across individual. From a European perspective, it seems inappropriate to focus on the national level. European policies for tackling youth unemployment should be complementary to certain types of transitional sequences rather than focus on a particular institutional setting.

We describe a general strategy to analyze sequence data and introduce SQ-Ados, a bundle of Stata programs implementing the proposed strategy. The programs include several tools for describing and visualizing sequences as well as a Mata library to perform optimal matching using the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm. With these programs Stata becomes the first statistical package to offer a complete set of tools for sequence analysis.

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Sequence analysis was originally invented by biologists with the aim of comparing DNA sequences in order to find out to what extent two DNA strands are homologous to each other or, in other words, to determine the distance between them (Kruskal 1983). The established degree of similarity then allows for conclusions about a common ancestor of two DNA strands. The initial utilization of sequence analysis in sociology was made in the 1980s, with Andrew Abbott's work on musicians' careers and ritual dances (Abbott 1983;Abbott and Forrest 1986). Here, sequence analysis was seen as a more qualitative tool in the context of historical, narrative sociology. Due to the limited capacity of computers, analysis was restricted to only a few cases with short sequences. With increasing technological development in the 1990s, researchers began to focus on individual sequences, such as class careers (

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