Job Mobility in the Millennial Generation: The Roles of Gender and Education

Wioletta Grzenda , SGH Warsaw School of Economics
Agnieszka Marszalek, Independent researcher

Millennials exhibit a distinct approach to work when compared to preceding generations. Frequently, the work is of less significance in their lives, they are motivated by higher pay, quickly become dissatisfied and leave their jobs. The aim of our study is to examine the influence of gender and education on job mobility among young employees, using the example of the Polish labour market. We focus on Poland as a country where unemployment among young people is particularly low, but traditional gender-based social roles are still considered important. When analysing job changes, we go beyond previous studies by considering the duration of individual job episodes as well as the time-varying nature of some characteristics in young people, such as education or marital status. Our analysis was based on survival analysis methods including frailty models. Using data from the Generation and Gender Survey, we reveal that the impact of the examined factors on job mobility clearly depends on gender. We received that the impact of having a child on job mobility was significant only for women. Mothers had a lower risk of job changes compared to childless women. The stabilization of men's careers occurs with age and is associated with leaving the family home as well as marriage. However, in the case of women, these factors had no impact on professional mobility. Moreover, having a higher education more significantly impacts the risk of job changes for men than for women.

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 Presented in Session 98. Flash session 2 Economics, Human Capital and Labour Markets