Aussicht auf Erfolg?

Successful initial placement in the labor market as an important setting of the course for future working life is a repeatedly confirmed body of knowledge in the sociology of education. When considering the transition from training to the labor market, the German vocational training system is often equated with the dual training system, both in media and political discourse and in international comparison. However, Germany also has a second fully qualifying vocational training system: the school-based vocational training system. The training in this system is in part much less standardized and institutionalized than that of the dual system. This paper looks at both vocational training systems and compares the labor market outcomes of graduates of both systems at the beginning of their working lives. The analyses focus on the duration of the transition to the first job, the horizontal and vertical training adequacy as well as the stability of the first job. Using data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we examine the labor market earnings of education graduates from the graduation years 1973 to 2010 in West Germany. Indicators for occupational characteristics are constructed using data from the Occupational Panel for West Germany (OccPan), the Microcensus, and the Official Notices of the Federal Labor Office (Labor Statistics) and are fed to the individual data. Event data analyses and logistic regression models are used to investigate the influence of the education systems on the probability of starting a job as soon as possible and achieving horizontally and vertically adequate positions and stable employment. It turns out that the school-vocational system is internally structured in a much more heterogeneous way than previous studies suggest. Throughout the paper, a distinction is made between graduates of vocational schools and of health care schools, as the latter are in many respects more comparable to those of the dual system. Overall, it appears that graduates of the dual system and of schools of public health generally have more advantageous transitions than those of vocational schools. The paper contributes to our understanding of how vocational training systems structure individual labor market opportunities and highlights long-term consequences of unequal training structures.