Revealing Talent: Informal Skills Intermediation as an Emergent Pathway to Immigrant Labor Market Incorporation

Abstract

In today's fast-changing urban labor markets, skill formation is crucial to long-term income security and occupational advancement. While most studies emphasize the skills that workers acquire through formal training and educational programs, a less understood but equally important concern is how workers acquire skills through informal means and then how they demonstrate and defend skills for which they have no formal credentials. This is especially important when considering the labor market participation of less-educated immigrant workers with limited formal training and credentialing support. How do these immigrant workers develop, demonstrate, and defend their skills in receiving community labor markets? What factors facilitate or hinder these processes? How might skill formation be institutionalized in order to enhance immigrant labor market incorporation? In this paper we examine these questions through a study of Latino immigrant workers in North Carolina's construction industry. In particular, we focus on the role that immigrant skills intermediation, and the informal learning processes it supports, play in the formation of emergent pathways for developing, demonstrating, and defending immigrant talent in mainstream labor markets. We conclude that informal intermediation by established immigrant workers can facilitate immigrant skill development and demonstration in mainstream labor markets and thus provides an important pathway for advancing the labor market status of less-educated immigrant workers.

Skills on the Move

“…By relying solely on country-specific credentials and easily-measurable skills to explain immigrant labor market outcomes in places of destination, human capital models are biasing research towards the study of elite immigrants (Williams, 2007). While a few studies have considered harder-to-measure aspects of work experience among immigrants with low levels of education (Waldinger & Bailey 1991; Ramírez & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2009; Lowe., Hagan, & Iskander, 2010;) such as informal on-the-job learning in immigrants’ jobs in the United States, the research presented in this paper is the first systematic attempt to consider the important role that informal skills learned and acquired on the job in places of origin have on the economic mobility opportunities of Latinos in U.S. labor markets. These transferred skill sets can translate into higher wages.…”

“…Skills learned on the job are acquired through interaction and observation and they include task-specific technical skills, social/interpersonal skills, managerial/entrepreneurial skills, and cultural skills, such as learning new practices or comparing practices. Though recognized in discussions of learning and skills development in the social science literatures more generally (Evans, Hodkinson, & Unwin, 2002; Spenner, 2010), on-the-job or workplace learning is an important but rarely measured source of knowledge in the immigration and labor market literature (some exceptions include Waldinger & Lichter, 2003; Lowe, Hagan, and Iskander 2010)). Rather, economists rely on proxies such as education and years of work experience, at the cost of understanding the actual processes of learning and skill use.…”

“…As such, on-the-job learning is as much a process of individual knowledge as a social process of learning through face-to- face interaction and exchanges of knowledge (Gertler, 2004). It is easy to see how these social processes related to on-the-job learning are especially important to understanding skill development and labor market adjustments for immigrants employed in work that has few formal educational requirements, or work associated with crafts, such as construction and landscaping, that depend on learning by doing rather than formal education (Light, 1972; Lowe, Hagan, and Iskander 2010; Ramírez & Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2009; Valenzuela, 2001; Pisani &Yoskowitz, 2005). …”

“…Although we know from Census and survey data that Latinos, including many authorized and unauthorized immigrants, have fared well in the U.S. construction and building trades in recent decades, with few exceptions (Milkman 2001; Valenzuela 2001;2006; Lowe, Hagan & Iskander , 2010; Waldinger & Bailey 1992), we know little about the social processes that facilitated their wage gains in this industry. The story of economic mobility in the construction industry is one that focuses almost exclusively on native-born Americans.…”

Social network influences on employee responses to organizational withdrawals

“…For example, embeddedness in local community networks has been identified as a component of general job embeddedness (Bailey, Chapain & de Ruyter, 2012;Clark, 2004;Felps et al, 2009). As such, it has been identified as an important factor in limiting employee turnover, and thus, indirectly facilitating skills development through the retention of experienced employees who can guide informal projects and provide mentoring (Lowe, Hagan & Iskander, 2010). Furthermore, social settings and groups can help individuals to connect with communities to access local information about professional opportunities, which might be off-limits otherwise (Jack & Anderson, 2002).…”