How do employees think the COVID-19 crisis will affect their careers?

Abstract

This study is the first in the world to investigate the expected impact of the COVID-19 crisis on career outcomes and career aspirations. To this end, high-quality survey research with a relevant sample of Flemish (Belgian) employees was conducted. About 21% of them fear losing their jobs due to the crisis—14% are concerned that they will even lose their jobs in the near future. In addition, 26% expect to miss out on promotions that they would have received had the COVID-19 crisis not occurred. This fear of a negative impact is higher in vulnerable groups, such migrants. In addition, we observe that many respondents believe they will look at the labour market differently and will have different work-related priorities in the future. In this respect, more than half of the respondents indicate that they have attached more importance to working conditions and work-life balance since the COVID-19 crisis.

The COVID-19 crisis and telework: a research survey on experiences, expectations and hopes

“…We analysed the responses of a sample of Flemish employees (see Sampling) as part of a broader COVID-19-related survey (for analysis of the other parts of this survey, we refer the reader to Lippens and colleagues [50]. In the context of the present study, three sets of items were submitted to the respondents; a complete list of item labels and statements can be found in Appendix A.…”

“…To summarize, by answering the aforementioned research questions, we not only contribute to the scientific literature on the (expected) socioeconomic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis [e.g. 6,8,49,50] but also to the scientific literature on telework and, more specifically, (i) the evaluation of telework by employees and (ii) the (objective and perceived) career consequences of telework [e.g. 23,30,[51][52][53][54].…”

Are Spaniards Happier When the Bars Are Open? Using Life Satisfaction to Evaluate COVID-19 Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs)

“…The main advantages of web surveys are that they can be implemented quickly and then allow for the study of rapidly changing situations such as the current pandemic. Indeed, several previous studies on the impact of COVID-19 on health, work, and personal and family situations have used data from the LWCV or other web surveys [ 3 , 4 , 12 , 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ]. The main drawback of voluntary web surveys is that they might suffer from some self-selection biases.…”

Building on Vietnam’s Recent COVID-19 Success: A Job-Focused Analysis of Individual Assessments on Their Finance and the Economy

“…As an example, reviewing early medical studies on the pandemic, [37] observe that many rapid pilot studies on serosurveillance, which use unstructured or convenience sampling strategies, have nonetheless yielded important, early, and actionable findings. For further comparison on the other key features of online surveys as suggested in [38], we show in Table 1 [39][40][41][42][43] a sample of five recently published studies that employ online surveys and the convenience sampling method to investigate the impacts of COVID-19. These studies cover various subjects such as finance, expectations about own career, parenting practices, and perception of government responses.…”

“…Notably, no studies discuss whether they receive internal review board (IRB) approval for the survey. Only two studies pilot the questionnaire before implementing the survey [41,42] and another two studies make some post-survey weighting adjustments [42,43]. Three studies describe cleaning the data to remove incomplete questionnaires [40][41][42].…”