Education and Unemployment Patterns for Young Workers with Job Experience in Spain

This paper analyzes the education and unemployment patterns for young workers with some experience in Spain at the beginning of the current economic crisis, using the ad hoc module of the Spanish Labour Force Survey 2009. The results clearly show that educational level and field of study are crucial when explaining the instability of the first job and the difficulty in obtaining another one. Specifically, the lower is the educational level, the greater is the risk of unemployment, not only because it is less likely to keep the first job, but also because it is harder to find another one. Moreover, considering the field of study at a given educational level, it is detected that graduates from health and welfare are the best positioned in the labour market (especially university degree holders). For the rest of fields of study, and despite the differences in the risk of unemployment are small, it is observed that the lowest level of unemployment corresponds to sciences and technology, followed by social sciences and the rest of fields. The education and unemployment patterns detected in the paper may be useful to guide both policy and individual decisions. 1. Introduction The high unemployment rate observed nowadays in the Spanish labour market has very negative consequences for young people, since they are especially sensitive to the business cycle. According to the Spanish Labour Force Survey, the unemployment rate for young workers in Spain was 34.09% in the third quarter of 2013, while this percentage was significantly higher than the national average of 25.98%. These figures reflect barriers in the school-to-work transition, which has been recently studied in the literature (see, e.g., [1–3]) Moreover, the high unemployment rate also affects young workers who have successfully found a first job and struggle to maintain it, since when they lose it their probability of unemployment is considerable. In 2013, there were 7,249,800 active people under 35 in Spain; about 7.25% of them were looking for their first job, meaning that more than 6,700,000 active people in this age group had some previous experience. These young workers may be still working in their first job or, alternatively, they may be employed in a different one or unemployed. Although this group of workers is really numerous, little has been said about their labour market situation in the literature. This paper partially fills in this gap. Moreover, as education (level and field of study) plays a crucial role in workers’ career, the main objective of this study is to analyse the education