‘Virtuous’ and ‘Vicious’ Circles? Adults’ Participation in Different Types of Training in the UK and Its Association with Wages

Abstract

The relationship between education, skills and labour market outcomes is becoming an increasingly pressing issue in many countries. In the UK, recent changes in education and skills funding structures and the ongoing consequences of the 2008 recession may have affected participation in training. ‘Virtuous’ and ‘vicious’ circles of learning may exist, whereby access to training is associated with social advantage, and training begets more training. We explore workers’ participation in different types of training and how this is associated with wages using the UK Household Longitudinal Study. Our exploratory findings suggest that those working in lower-level occupations may not only be less likely to undertake training in general, but also less likely to have done types of training associated with wage increases (e.g., to meet occupational standards), and more likely to have done training associated with no or negative changes in wages (e.g., health and safety) compared to those working in higher-level occupations. We suggest that further research is needed to unpack the ‘black box’ of training and its impacts upon different groups of people. We discuss the implications of our findings to help break the ‘vicious’ circles.

Types of Education, Achievement and Labour Market Integration over the Life Course

“…Occupational outcomes tied to certain types of education differ for men and women, people with and without a migration background (Naseem, 2019;Zimmermann & Seiler, 2019) as well as by the national context (Barroso-Hurtado & Chan, 2019;Korber, 2019). In a similar vein, educational attainment in adulthood and the concomitant labour market outcomes are related to individuals' social background and occupational status (Bratsberg et al, 2019;Luchinskaya & Dickinson, 2019). Last but not least, two cohort comparisons provide the first tentative evidence that the relationship between types of education and labour market outcomes may have changed over time (Glauser et al, 2019;Kratz et al, 2019).…”

“…On the other hand, several contributions provide evidence that-despite these differences-there is considerable heterogeneity within types of education. VET, higher education as well as further training after labour market entry are linked to heterogeneous outcomes, which differ markedly by the chosen occupational field/level or type of training (Bratsberg et al, 2019;Grønning & Trede, 2019;Luchinskaya & Dickinson, 2019;Sander & Kriesi, 2019). Furthermore, the contributions on this issue show that there is interplay between types of education and ascribed characteristics, such as gender, social origin or migration background.…”

“…The contribution of Luchinskaya and Dickinson (2019) distinguishes between different types of further training after completion of full-time education and investigates their relationship with wages. The authors show that the reasons for further training differ between workers with different occupational status.…”

Returns to Workplace Training for Male and Female Employees and Implications for the Gender Wage gap: A Quantile Regression Analysis

“…Existing studies suggest that general skills training (e.g. to maintain occupational standards) is associated with higher productivity (Barret & O'Connel, 2001) and wage returns (Jones et al, 2011;Luchinskaya & Dickinson, 2019), while this is not the case for specific training (e.g. induction training).…”

“…In the literature on training returns, the issue of training endogeneity is well known (e.g. Luchinskaya & Dickinson, 2019). The problem arises because training participation may not be random, but training participants may have different observed or unobserved characteristics compared to those who do not.…”