Belgian labour career determinants in European perspective

Life- and career-histories can be seen as an ordered sequence of employment states. Daily, monthly or yearly observations form a string of employment states, portraying one’s career. Many scholars have argued that recently, we have moved from “traditional” and rather rigid careers, to more “transitional”, “protean” or “boundaryless careers”, trading a lifelong employment and psychological contract for employability and the exploration of new ventures.

Though these changes are widely documented, European labour markets are repeatedly said to obstruct the coming of age of these transitional careers. Often diagnosed as suffering from Eurosclerosis, European labour markets, to varying degrees, have been faced with high unemployment, and inactivity, late entry and early retirement. Though recently, some authors have seen improvement, high degrees of job security, collective bargaining and labour regulation are said to shape the European employment careers and bring necessary change and flexibility to a grinding halt. While transitional careers were found to exist on the Belgian labour market traditional careers continue to be the norm. Personal characteristics such as education, gender, age and migration status were found to be decisive factors in career outlook.

Most studies of European careers have confined their scope to the comparison of careers in one or a few countries at a time. Often, one exemplary country out of each welfare state type of the canonical Esping-Andersen typology is used. Because of data limits, little attempts have been made to compare employment histories on a broader scale. The impact of highly divergent social, economical and institutional backgrounds on employment careers is yet to be fully explored.

The aim of this article is threefold. First, we want to use the European Household Panel to construct a career typology which spans 14 European countries. The ECHP data provides us with longitudinal and internationally comparable data needed in order to create such a typology. The focus lies on the international comparability. Like previous research, we will use optimal matching techniques to cluster careers into types. A second focus of the article is to assess the distribution of these career patterns across Europe. We are interested in both the global distribution and the specific distributions of male and female careers. Finally, we test the reliability of our typology by testing a limited number of career determinants on our European career patterns. Special attention is paid to Belgian careers in a comparative European frame and additional models were estimated to test the effects of person and country level variables on the Belgian career distribution.