The student workforce plays a substantial part in several low-paying industries such as retail and hospitality, and this has grown over time. However, there has been little recent research. The usual assumption is that students compete successfully with the local labour force for low-skill, part-time jobs, but there is little evidence for this.…

International political discourse has implied that upskilling leads to higher productivity and growth. Combining aspects from skills theory and institutional theory, this article asks what role upskilling can play in making bad jobs better, drawing on previous research about the process of professionalising the cleaning occupation in Norway. In…

Previous research examining skill mismatch in the labour market has ignored potential implications for workers outside of the work environment. We argue that the psychological strain that the discrepancy between worker's skills and job requirements wields on workers spills over into the non-work sphere, increasing work-life conflict. This study…

Based on Swedish register data from 2003 to 2012, this study attempts to explain over-education and upward mobility among tertiary graduates. Rarely used explanatory factors are central in the analyses, such as 'still in study' and 'field of education'. Tertiary graduates in low-wage jobs are regarded as over-educated. The results of this work…

This paper contributes to debates around social mobility and social capital by exploring the links between social class background, assistance from non-parental personal contacts for finding employment, and social class destination. The literature on social mobility, social capital and social networks is reviewed, drawing a conceptual distinction…

Human capital investment is a necessary condition for improving labour market outcomes in most countries. Empirical studies to investigate human capital and its linkages on the labour demand side are, however, relatively scarce due to limitations of firm-level data-sets. Using firm-level data from the Thai manufacturing sector, this paper aims to…

Changes in the nature of unskilled work are reinforcing barriers to workers' access to training and increasing requirements for training and development. Until individual and structural barriers to work-based learning are eliminated, policies stressing individual responsibility for learning will only reinforce inequalities. (Contains 40…

De-industrialisation and the development of the "service economy" have had a profound impact on the nature of work and employment in contemporary Britain. Theories of post- and reflexive modernity argue that individuals are able to reflexively reconstruct their identities in line with new social and workplace requirements. Yet,…

This article presents a critique of the 'high skills' argument which, in the international literature, presents a high skill strategy as an adjunct and necessary condition for the successful expansion of human resources development (HRD) alongside social market institutions and 'joined up' policy. For a developing country such as South Africa,…