Opening Doors for Immigrants: The Importance of Occupational and Workplace-Based Cultural Skills for Successful Labor Market Entry

Chiara Zisler, Samuel Luethi, Damiano Pregaldini and Uschi Backes-Gellner

No 204, Economics of Education Working Paper Series from University of Zurich, Department of Business Administration (IBW)

Abstract: Young immigrants, who often lack country-specific human capital, face greater challenges in the transition from education to the labor market (e.g., lower employment probabilities, longer unemployment spells) than native adolescents. This paper analyzes the effect of workplace-based cultural skills - skills that can only be acquired at work - on a successful transition. We exploit a natural experiment in which students acquire occupational skills in one of two types of vocational education and training (VET): either dual programs with training in firms complemented by vocational schooling or purely school-based programs. While well-defined curricula ensure identical occupational skills in both programs, the training of workplace-based cultural skills differs systematically and is concentrated in dual programs. As young immigrants lack essential cultural skills, we expect that additional workplace-based cultural skills training in dual VET improves immigrants' transition into the labor market and thus their longer-term employment prospects. Using administrative data, we compare the way both programs affect the labor market entry of immigrant groups with pronounced cultural disadvantages. To estimate causal effects on employment outcomes, we exploit variation in travel times to vocational schools that offer school-based VET programs. Results show that completing dual VET, as opposed to school-based VET, leads to significantly reduced unemployment probabilities for young immigrants, suggesting that workplace-based cultural skills are crucial for young immigrants' transitions from education into the labor market.

Keywords: Immigrants; Labor market integration; Education-to-work transition; Education programs; Cultural heterogeneity; Age at Arrival (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I25 I26 J24 J61 M53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2023-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur, nep-lma, nep-mig and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iso:educat:0204

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