OCCUPATIONAL ATTAINMENT AND CAREER PROGRESSION IN SWEDEN

ABSTRACT

We analyze occupational attainment and career progression over the life course for Swedish men and women, born in 1925–1974. Careers progress (measured as improvements in occupational prestige) fast during the first 5–10 years in the labour market, and flatten out afterwards (approximately between 30–40 years of age). This is in line with the occupational status maturation hypothesis. Both class origin and educational attainment affect occupational attainment. The effects of educational attainment vary more over the career, but depend on the educational attainment level in question. Successive cohorts of women gain higher occupational prestige, and continue to gain in occupational prestige longer across their careers. We also find that cohorts that entered the labour market in times of economic downturns and restructuring (the oil crisis years and the early 1990s) had more difficulties in establishing their careers. Returns to education generally increase across cohorts, while class background differences decrease, as has been reported in earlier research.

Keywords:

• occupational attainment
• careers
• stratification
• growth curve analysis
• Sweden

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of the paper have been presented at the Tilburg meeting of this special issue's working group and at the Swedish Institute for Social Research. We thank the participants, and in particular Colin Mills, Carlo Barone, Antonio Schizzerotto, John Goldthorpe, and an anonymous reviewer for valuable comments. The responsibility for any mistakes remains ours.

Notes

¹Due to the quick expansion of higher education in the 1960s and the 1970s those born in the late 1940s have the highest proportion with university education (Stanfors 2007), although this may have changed with the new phase of expansion in the 1990s.

²We also experimented with using the ISEI score as our dependent variable. The result remained virtually unchanged and the correlation between the two scores in our sample was 0.9. Furthermore, the Spearman correlation between SIOPS and earnings remained virtually the same in 1968 and 2000 (0.48 vs. 0.50, respectively).

³Using the linear birth year the significance remained for men (χ² = 14.66; df = 4; P = 0.01) and the interactions became marginally significant for women (χ² = 8.16; df = 4; P = 0.09).