PurposeThis study aims to examine the effect of firm-specific skills on formal and informal training and development (T&D) effectiveness, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and the moderating effect of job tenure on each hypothesized path. The authors adopt a micro perspective on human capital, arguing its significance to examine the role of job attitudes in developing firm-specific skills.Design/methodology/approachA total of 1,514 South Korean workers' responses were obtained from the Human Capital Corporate Panel dataset. This study conducted structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the structural relationships between the study variables. A subsequent multigroup SEM was conducted to determine whether the structural model differed across job tenures by comparing the results for employees with more than and less than six years of tenure.FindingsThe findings indicate that (a) firm-specific skills have a negative effect on formal T&D effectiveness and no significant effect on informal T&D effectiveness; (b) firm-specific skills have a negative effect on job satisfaction and no significant effect on turnover intentions; (c) formal T&D effectiveness has a positive effect on job satisfaction and a negative effect on turnover intentions; (d) informal T&D effectiveness has a positive effect on job satisfaction and no significant effect on turnover intentions; and (e) job tenure partially moderates the relationships among the proposed study variables.Originality/valueThe study's findings provide new insights into human capital theory, focusing on whether firm-specific skills can be a source of sustained competitive advantage from employees' perspectives.

With older workers staying in or re-entering the workforce post-retirement, there has been growing interest in the aging workforce. This study examines how active seniors' job changes impact life satisfaction through person-job fit and job satisfaction. Drawing on conservation of resources, person-job fit, and spillover theories, we developed and tested a serial multiple mediation model on 2183 active seniors using the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study data. The results of PROCESS macro analysis showed that (a) job change negatively affects life satisfaction, (b) both person-job fit and job satisfaction parallelly mediate the job change and life satisfaction relationship, and (c) there is a serial multiple mediation effect of person-job fit and job satisfaction on the job change and life satisfaction relationship. Our study reveals the link between work and nonwork domains as informed by the three theories, extends the existing literature on life satisfaction from a bottom-up perspective, and considers cultural characteristics.