Suchergebnisse

How many jobs are there? : labor demand and the limits of training policy -- How important is education? : rhetoric and reality in the skills mismatch debate -- Does job training work? : lessons from the Job Training Partnership Act -- Power and "empowerment" : the final frontier of job training -- The politics of job training : the legislative history of JTPA -- Job training after welfare reform : training for discipline -- Conclusion : job training as political diversion

This paper analyzes new data on job qualifications and training. Between 1983 and 1991, the share of workers reporting skill‐improvement training on their jobs increased as did the wage premium for this training. Even in 1991, however, 58 percent of all workers reported no training on their jobs, and 44 percent reported needing no special qualifications to obtain their jobs. Training rates are especially low for young and less‐educated workers. Skill demands appear to have shifted toward general and cognitive skills—best taught in formal training programs and schools—and away from specific and manual skills acquired through informal on‐the‐job training.

How workers learn how to do their jobs is central to an understanding of the changing nature of work in post-industrial society. The role of job or worker training has, however, been underdeveloped in sociological theories of work and the labor market. By most accounts, the ongoing penetration of information technology into the workplace, a transformed socioeconomic lifecourse, managerial preferences for high performance organizations, and the globalization of labour markets have collectively rendered traditional models of skill acquisition badly outmoded. This volume offers sophisticated sociological analyses of job training that go well beyond standard accounts of general versus specific skills and overly simple assumptions about employer and worker behaviour. The chapters examine such topics as the incentives available to employers to provide training, socially structured inequalities in access to training, and cross-societal differences in training institutions. They break new ground in investigating the content of job training as well as its incidence and duration. The contributors to the volume bring to bear both qualitative case study and quantitative research to explore the emerging role of training in post-industrial labor markets.

Using personnel records of 11,051 US Civil Service employees for 1974-1977, the relationship of institutional job training to salary is examined as a function of minority/sex group & time in the career. The results suggest that job training is especially important to employees early in their careers; that minorities & women receive less training than white Ms; & that the dollar returns to training vary by minority/sex group. The implications of these findings are discussed for administrative policies such as affirmative action. 3 Tables, 18 References. Modified HA

Previous analyses of employee participation in company-provided job training programs, using cross-sectional data on cumulative incidence levels, found either that men receive more training than women or no significant gender differences. The authors conducted event-history analyses of the hazard rate of entry into initial firm training programs by a national cohort of young workers. Rather than closing the gender gap, the women's training disadvantage widened after controlling for theoretically important human capital, occupational, industrial, organizational, and family-stage variables. Further examination of women's and men's distributions on these independent variables and estimates of separate event-history equations suggest that gender segregation by occupation and industry, workweek length, and family role obligations afford men better training opportunities than women. The authors conclude with suggestions for future research and speculations about the policy implications for closing the persistent gender gap in company-provided job training.