The Role of Off-the-Job vs. On-the-Job Training for the Mobility of Women Workers

Abstract

The transition from school to work is typically a period in which many young workers experience a wide range of different jobs and experience some of their most rapid wage growth over their working life. Robert Hall (1982) has estimated that the first 10 years of an individual's working career will include approximately two-thirds of all lifetime job changes. Robert Topel and Michael Ward (1988) found that over half of young male new entrants held six or more jobs over the first 10 years of their work experience. Only one young male worker in twenty held a single job for 10 years in their sample. All of this suggests that young workers' early years in the labor market involve several employment transitions. The purpose of this paper is to examine for young workers in their first years of work the determinants of leaving an employer. In particular, this paper focuses on the role of different types of training on the probability of leaving an employer. In previous work (1990) I have examined the impact of private-sector training on the determination of wages and wage growth of young workers and reached the following conclusions. First, formal company-provided onthe-job training (ON-JT) appears to be highly firm-specific in the United States and, therefore, is not portable from employer to employer. Company-provided training raises wages in the current job but has no effect on the wages earned in subsequent employment. Second, formal off-the-job training (OFF-JT) received from proprietary institutions has little effect on the wages earned on the current job, but it does raise the expected wage in subsequent employment. Finally, there are important differences by race, gender, and education level in the probability of receiving different types of formal training and in the impact this training has on wages and wage growth. These findings have several implications for the impact of training on mobility. One implication is that if company-provided training is primarily firm-specific, then the probability of leaving an employer should decline if a young worker has experienced some ON-JT. An additional implication is that if a worker participates in an OFF-JT program, it appears that the worker should be more likely to leave the current employer. In this case, OFF-JT allows a young worker to change career paths and find a better match. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey Youth (NLSY) cohort, this paper examines in detail the factors that influence the probability of new entrants leaving their first job, including the differential effects of company-provided training, apprenticeships, and training from for-profit proprietary institutions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 157 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.