In the USA, the great exodus could be observed after the corona pandemic: people left their jobs in droves and hoped to find the promised land with other employers, there was talk of the “Great Resignation”, mass resignations. And even for the rather sluggish German labor market, some surveys claim to have found out that the desire for a change reaches maximum values. Bartender instead of clerk, finally doing something completely different – at least the dream of a new start seems to be widespread.
Labor market experts from the Bertelsmann Foundation have now examined how job changes really work in this country. To do this, they used data from the National Education Panel, a regular survey of more than 10,000 adults in Germany. Around 38,000 career changes were documented in it, but not all people are equally willing to change.
The real job hoppers are therefore not the well-qualified specialists with a strong longing for more self-realization and more options. Above all, those people whose job has previously required little or no training often reorient themselves. On average, around eleven out of 100 employees in so-called helper activities change jobs within a year. Those who work in a more demanding job, on the other hand, are more attached to their profession. Changes occur only half as often among these employees as among helpers.
The Bertelsmann researchers led by Tobias Ortmann wanted to know which professions the employees move between, i.e. whether they switch to related or completely different jobs and which paths are the more promising. “So far there has not been a study that has examined this for Germany because there was no good data for the similarity of occupations,” says labor market researcher Ortmann. He and his team wanted to close this gap: In order to be able to compare different jobs, the Bertelsmann authors used the job descriptions from the Online encyclopedia of the Federal Employment Agency evaluated.
In the online encyclopedia, the Federal Employment Agency regularly enters the skills required in job advertisements and training regulations for around 3,000 occupations, which should paint a reasonably realistic picture of working life. For example, for a helper in precision mechanics, the lexicon lists knowledge of plastics processing. Along with many others, this ability is also mentioned for a helper in mechanical engineering, who also needs a forklift driver’s license, among other things. Overall, a precision engineering assistant could contribute around 85 percent of his or her previous skills as an assistant in mechanical engineering.
The more similar the new job is to the old one, the greater the increase in salary
In fact, however, those who frequently leave their jobs are drawn to jobs that are far away rather than close by: almost two-thirds of helpers find themselves in a job after a change that looks completely different from their previous one. “It’s not at all unreasonable that warehouse workers switch to other helper jobs, for example in the call center,” explains Ortmann. “But the new job has no connection with the old one.” Such 180-degree turns are anything but ideal on the job market. A change tends to lead to a better salary, but especially if the new job is similar to the old one.
Anyone who switches to a similar profession earns 3495 euros more per year than someone who changes to a completely different area. Anyone who switches to a related job still has a wage increase of 2468 compared to a complete change of job. The famous side entry may be worthwhile, but the shoemaker gets a lot more out of it if he sticks halfway to his last. The result does not come as a surprise to Ortmann, the author of the study. “But you can see from these immense differences in income how disadvantaged people are who cannot change within their professional field,” he says. There should therefore be better training opportunities, especially for low-skilled workers in helper jobs.