Research project Careers in the Swedish labor market from the 1960's and onward

A common picture of today's labor market is that careers have become more complex in contrast to the labor market of the past characterized by permanent jobs with few shifts between jobs and employment statuses. The pace of change is often assumed to be rapid. But is this correct?

Our overall research question is whether the Swedish labor market has gone from stability to instability in terms of both early and mid-life careers and how this differ for women and men, those with and without immigration background, and in various local labor markets. By doing analyzes focusing on time from education to job, length of employment spells, and career patterns, we will be able to shed light on changes for birth cohorts born from the 1940s and onwards.

We will use register data and the occupational biographies in the Level of Living Surveys – the most recent ones to be collected in 2020. Methodologically, we combine state-of-the-art deductive longitudinal methods with more inductive pattern-generating methods such as sequence analyses. The research group will be active for three years and consists of a professor, an associate professor and two promising junior researchers. The contribution of our project will be to study instability of the labor market over a long historical period to the present, to follow individuals in both early and late careers, and to combine methods in order to draw empirically well-founded conclusions about trends in the Swedish labor market.