Katarina Zigova (University of Zurich)
Caroline Neuber-Pohl, Giovanni Russo and Giulia Santangelo
Vocational education shall equip students with a mix of general, occupational, and firm specific skills—skills that are relevant for the world of work. In this paper we investigate whether workers with vocational background have an advantage to find jobs that match their skills. We do it by estimating the effect of vocational education on underskilling employing three different European skill surveys, each offering some unique perspective on skills. The surveys allow us to construct numerous self-reported measures of underskilling. In many cases we find that vocationally educated perceive on average smaller degree of underskilling as compared to workers with general education. Looking into mechanisms of this effect, we see that closeness of vocational education system to labour market is a relevant drivers of differences in underskilling between vocationally and generally educated workers. Using two different methods, we calculate actual degree of underskilling from actual skills data and find that actual underskilling proxies well the self-reported measures.