Career changes, a word covering opposite situations

Labour force surveys allow occupational changes from one year to the next to be observed, by comparing the reported classification codes. It is the most common and the crudest measure.

A change of code may reflect real mobility, a reclassification of the same job, or a variation in how the person describes their employment. Serious analyses therefore exclude minor changes within the same occupational family.

The threshold for speaking of a career change remains a matter of convention. Is moving from accountant to management controller a change of occupation? The answer depends on the level of detail of the classification, and the published rate depends directly on it.

Chosen mobility, accompanying progression, differs from fallback mobility, following job loss or physical wear, and from mobility constrained by the disappearance of an occupation.

Surveys asking about the reported motive find a fairly balanced distribution between those situations, which forbids commenting on an overall rate of career change as an indicator of dynamism. The boundary between these categories is in any case blurred for the people themselves, who may reconstruct a choice after the fact where there was a constraint, or the reverse.

Work on earnings trajectories after an occupational change finds substantial dispersion: some people progress, others suffer a lasting loss, particularly after redundancy.

Analyses of income loss after collective redundancy, conducted in several countries, find lasting effects measurable several years afterwards, the more marked the more sector-specific the skills were. The study by Louis Jacobson, Robert LaLonde and Daniel Sullivan, published in 1993 on American data, founded this literature.

France has set up several schemes funding individual training, whose terms have changed repeatedly since 2015. The validation of prior experience (validation des acquis de l'expérience), created in 2002, offers another route, based on recognising skills already exercised rather than on new training.

Available evaluations mainly concern take-up and the profile of beneficiaries. They find higher take-up among already qualified people, a finding common to most continuing training schemes.

Surveys do not follow people long enough after a career change to distinguish a successful transition from one that later deteriorates.

Matched administrative data, following paths over several years, are gradually filling that gap and produce more nuanced results than self-report surveys on immediate satisfaction.

They have their own blind spots: they report on income and contracts, but not on the content of the work or on what the person expected of it. A career change that reduces income may meet other criteria that the statistics do not see.