The Transition Period
The problem of defining the first job calls attention to the fact that it is not only Germany that has an awkward time in the life course that Allmendinger (1989b) referred to as the "transition period." All of the four societies discussed here have periods in which there is, or at least can be, a mix of education and labor force activity. The German case is quite clear because so many young people become apprentices and because apprenticeships have formal rules about combining schooling and work. However, young people in all of the other societies can experience a period during which there may be alternating or simultaneous school and work activities.
It is probably true that, given this commonly observed awkward period, the studies assembled in the Shavit & Miiller (1998) volume treated the period in as uniform a fashion as possible. They generally skipped over that awkward period and adopted a definition of the first job as a job that comes after the period of mixed experiences is over. In one way or another, they used an early job as an index of the first job. There is merit in that rough uniformity when one is making inter-societal comparisons.
There remains the nagging possibility, however, that the differences in the transition period
may be an important key to understanding the varied role of educational institutions in the
societies' social stratification processes. Until we have adequate data from the transition period for a number of societies, and we can trace the patterns of change within that period, we
cannot tell.