Revisiting the complementarity between education and training – the role of job tasks and firm effects

Determinants of Work-Related Training: An Investigation of Observed and Unobserved Firm-, Job- and Worker-Heterogeneity

“…In her review on the determinants of and returns to training, Asplund (2005) documents that formal education, gender, age, job status, firm size, labor market imperfections like wage compressions and search frictions, and finally unions are common characteristics that are generally found to be correlated with firm-provided training. In recent years, several studies confirmed former results and showed other job characteristics like tasks (Görlitz and Tamm, 2016) or high-performing workplaces (O'Connell and Byrne, 2012) to be further important aspects of observed heterogeneity. In addition, training persistence indicates that undetected worker heterogeneity is an important driver of training investments.…”

“…The authors can mostly validate results of previous studies using unmatched data and conclude that studies with only firm characteristics or only worker characteristics do not provide biased results due to omitted variables. Görlitz and Tamm (2016) use German linked employer-employee data to compare estimates of the determinants of training with and without task information and with and without firm-fixed effects. 4 Their results show ambiguous effects of including the firm-fixed effects but a clear impact of the inclusion of task information on the marginal effects of other worker-level characteristics.…”

“…On the other hand, we still do not know a lot about the drivers of training participation; a huge share of the variation remains unexplained. Görlitz and Tamm (2016) get a Pseudo R squared of 0.15 for training incidence in the past 12 months in a model with individual and job characteristics (including tasks) and firm-fixed effects. Grund and Martin (2012) show with the German Socio-Economic Panel a decreasing goodness of fit over the observation period 1989-2008.…”

No Future, No Training? Explaining Cross-national Variation in the Effect of Job Tasks On Training Participation

“…This has often been attributed to inequalities in initial education: those who received little initial schooling also receive less further training. However, recent research challenged this interpretation by showing that participation in further training is mainly determined by characteristics of workplaces and occupations and less by individual resources (Schindler et al 2011;Görlitz and Tamm 2016;Saar and Räis 2017).…”

“…Research on training participation revealed that workers in jobs with a high substitution potential face a double disadvantage: they are likely to lose their jobs to computers and have less access to further training (OECD 2019). This is because of the job tasks these workers conduct: the probability of training participation is lower among workers conducting routine tasks, who are most likely to be replaced by machines (Görlitz and Tamm 2016;Kleinert and Wölfel 2018). Nevertheless, current technological change also generates new jobs (Bessen 2015;Autor 2015).…”