Which First Job?
The whole purpose of the Shavit & Muller (1998) volume, as well as many earlier studies, is
to examine the process by which young people leave school and enter their first jobs. Yet, it is
apparent that those who study this process do not always agree about which job is the first job.
One question that is rather easily dealt with is the question of what constitutes a "job."
Most analysts agree that it should be an activity for which one is paid, that it should be "fulltime"
(say, 30+ hours a week), that it should be held for at least some period of time (say, 3
months), and that it should not be held only during school vacations. The question of what
qualifies as a first job is a more difficult one.
The case of the German apprentices (Allmendinger, 1989a; Muller et al., 1998) has received
the most attention in this regard. Although an apprenticeship might be thought of as a
first job, most scholars view that period of a young person's life as part of his or her education.
So, the first job in most studies of Germany is the first job after completing an apprenticeship.
Assuming that this is a reasonable resolution in the case of Germany, how does one
handle other parallel cases that are not exactly the same? Many young Britons enter first jobs
that make it possible for the employee to take part-time courses at a college of further education
facilitated by released time and even by payment of any costs by the employer. (The
employer may even require the employee to take such courses.) These courses often lead to
increased educational credentials which, in turn, can facilitate promotions.*
In such cases, should the "first job" be the one taken initially or the one made possible by
the higher educational credential? Additionally, if the worker-employer arrangement continues
for several years, at what point does one say the worker entered a first job? Most studies of
Great Britain define the initial job as the "first job." It is apparent, however, that the very
different definitions of the first job in Germany and in Great Britain are one reason scholars
have reported a much stronger association between educational credentials and the occupational
level of the first job in Germany than in Great Britain.
Multiple entries into the labor force, interspersed with periods in school, also occur in
Britain, but they are more common in the United States (Arum & Hout, 1998). In such cases,
should the "first job" be the job obtained on the initial entry into the labor force or the one
obtained after all spells of full-time education have been completed?
If the first full-time job obtained on the initial entry into the American labor force is the
reference point, the credential-occupation association is bound to be much weaker than if the
reference point is the job obtained after the last spell of full-time schooling. Arum & Hout
(1998) used the latter definition of first job. This has the merit of using a single definition for
all cases, but it ignores the possible effects of multiple labor-force entries in some cases.
Although it is possible to criticize any of these ways of defining the first job, they all have
the significant advantage of being clear and precise. That advantage often flows from the
nature of the data sets used in the studies. Detailed longitudinal data sets provide full reports