Effects of the Corona pandemic on job-related learning in adult life

Since the first lockdown in March 2020, it has been discussed widely and controversially how the Corona pandemic has affected learning participation, processes, and outcomes. However, these debates have focused heavily on children and adolescents in initial education. The question of how the pandemic has affected learning in adult age, particularly job-related adult education and training (AET), has been largely neglected in public discourse and research.

The necessity of lifelong learning has grown in recent decades due to technological change and demographic ageing of the workforce, yet the participation in AET remains socially stratified. The Corona pandemic has now profoundly changed the supply and demand for adult education in a short period of time. Traditional AET in the form of on-site courses has largely collapsed, and many firms have reduced their investment in training. At the same time, new opportunities for professional learning have emerged for some groups of employees due to short-time work, while others had less time because they had to care for their children when working from home. Finally, the crisis led to accelerated digitization, which has created the need for many employees to learn new things quickly. Overall, therefore, it is yet to be seen—and so far not sufficiently studied empirically—how the pandemic has affected participation in different forms of AET, which learning barriers and opportunities the crisis brought, and how this has changed patterns of social inequality in AET. Since AET will be a key component in mitigating pandemic-related distortions in the labour market, it is important to answer these questions soon in order to derive targeted adult education strategies.

To this end, we plan to conduct empirical analyses using large-scale panel data from NEPS collected annually since the late 2000s through fall 2020-spring 2021, providing detailed longitudinal information on nonformal and informal job-related learning among employed adults.

• Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
• Project lead: Prof. Dr. Corinna Kleinert
• Team / Internal collaborator: Dr. Christina Haas
• External collaborator(s):
  • Prof. Dr. Martin Ehlert (WZB)
  • Prof. Dr. Gundula Zoch (Universit?t Oldenburg) 

Project term: 02/2022 – 01/2023

Kompromissbildung und deren Konsequenzen – Pfadabh?ngigkeiten zwischen Berufsfindung, Bildungsentscheidungen und Ausbildungsverl?ufen (?berg?nge)

In dem Projekt ??berg?nge“ wird der Prozess der Berufswahl im ?bergang von der Schule und dessen Konsequenzen für ?berg?nge in Ausbildung und Ausbildungsverl?ufe untersucht. Berufswahlprozesse und die damit einhergehenden Bildungsentscheidungen sind wichtige Entwicklungsschritte für junge Menschen, und gleichzeitig stellt der erlernte Beruf zentrale Weichen für ihre Karrierechancen. In Deutschland strukturieren Berufe den ?bergang in das Erwerbsleben besonders stark und spielen eine Schlüsselrolle bei der (Re-)Produktion sozialer Ungleich