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Purpose: This paper aims to explore the types of learning engendered by internal mobility (IM) by referring to the principles elaborated by Bateson (1972). Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative methodology is followed with interviews among 50 professionals working at four large French firms. Findings: A system of classification for IM is proposed, namely, replication, adaptation, innovation and revolution. Practical implications: The identification of these categories invites human resource managers to reconsider the traditional career paths. Originality/value: This paper brings a new perspective on the possible link between learning and IM and questions what employees really learn thanks to their moves.

This paper discusses the scope of the employee's voice in lifelong education decisions, with a focus on qualified assembly-line workers and professional development schemes allowing their upward mobility out of the assembly line. Using a capability approach, it investigates voice as part of people's agency. Beyond examining the channels that allow employees to have a say in training matters -- weak definition of voice -- it addresses voice as a process that participates in the conversion of the available training resources and opportunities into lifelong education achievements -- strong definition of voice. Comparing two subsidiaries of a multinational firm, one located in Germany and the other in France, we ask under what institutional and organizational conditions employees are able to express and then achieve what they value. In adopting a multi-level perspective which integrates qualitative data of an institutional, organizational and individual nature, we show how in France and Germany the worker's voice in training matters pertains to two different models of responsibility sharing. In Germany the worker's voice is associated with self-determination and self-care as a consequence of the externalization of lifelong education outside the confines of the firm; this results in a weak voice that requires personal or family resources in order to get converted into a strong voice. In France, where national legislation obliges firms to devote a percentage of the gross wage bill to training, companies have historically played an important role in the lifelong education of workers, so that until the country's last training reforms introducing a personal training account in 2014, the worker's voice was strongly shaped by organizational factors. Whether this voice is weak or strong depends upon the organizational strategy, processes and involvement in lifelong training.

The French worker certification system is focusing on efforts to design a scheme for the accreditation of work-based learning. If implemented, the scheme would be directed by a business-government-worker partnership, recognized and accepted by different occupations, and accessible to all employees regardless of the way their qualifications were acquired. Applicable to a labor market characterized by discontinuous work experiences and precarious employment conditions, such a mechanism would permit worker mobility between jobs and complement the traditional certification regime. Important issues in this effort include: (1) developing standards according to common rules to allow comparison between occupations; (2) establishing student evaluation using multiple forms, such as combining one or more of interview, test, observation and simulation; and (3) structuring qualifications to demonstrate mastery of an occupation or elements of multiple occupations to help create individual career paths. (Sidebars discuss findings of an original research study upon which the scheme is based and general certification practices in various French industries.) (AJ)

The French employers federation (MEDEF) has taken the initiative to develop a joint inter-sectoral mechanism for accreditation of occupational competences. The approach analyzes occupations at a more abstract level than the tasks performed within a specific job to facilitate comparison of different occupations from different sectors and allow recognition of competences across sectors. Qualification systems in the transition countries are changing gradually but still firmly rooted in formal education and training systems. Transition from command to market economies has affected these systems and often widened the gap between the worlds of work and education. A qualification mechanism driven by the social partners that promotes trans-sectoral mobility would be an important step in closing the gap. The European Training Foundation has undertaken support activities in the transition countries to develop a common understanding of qualifications, competences, and vocational education and training standards. The project has helped define a common concept of "assessment of competence," identify main principles and best practice in the European Union and partner countries, and develop a road map for development of competence-based assessment systems in partner countries. The MEDEF-initiated mechanism provides an important example of how such a competence-based system could work, but it is still remote from realities of the transition countries. (YLB)

This paper gives a detailed account of an analysis carried out at the French National Skiing and Mountaineering School from August 2008 to June 2009 to assess the language needs of French mountain guides. A targeted literature review highlighted two main points to be taken into account in the design of this language needs analysis: target situations and insiders' expert knowledge. Then, one hypothesis and two research questions were identified. Data gathering methods--including unstructured interviews, non-participant observation of the foreign language certification process and a questionnaire--allowed testing of the questions via triangulation (by sources and methods) to validate the results. (Contains 3 tables.)

Purpose: Using a representative survey of young persons having left full-time education in France in 1998 and interviewed in 2001 and 2005, the purpose of this paper is to examine the process of their integration into normal employment (a stable job with a standard employment contract) and the extent to which job matches are inefficient in the sense that the pay in a job is below an individual's potential earnings. The latter are determined principally by diploma level and educational specialisation, although other forms of training and labour market experience are relevant. Design/methodology/approach: A stochastic earnings frontier approach is used in order to examine workers' ability to capture their full potential earnings in labour markets where there is inefficient job matching (due to the lack of information, discrimination, over-education or the process of integration). Findings: The results suggest that young workers manage to obtain on average about 82 per cent of their potential earnings three years after leaving full-time education and earnings inefficiency had disappeared four years later. The results are robust to the treatment of selectivity arising from the exclusion of the unemployed in the estimation of the frontier. Originality/value: The stochastic earnings frontier is a useful and appropriate tool for modelling the process of labour market integration of certain groups (young persons, migrants and the long-term unemployed) where over-education due to inefficient initial job matches occurs. Over time this situation tends to be rectified as job mobility leads to improved matching and less inefficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand to what extent the analysis of career scripts explains the inertia in implementing mandatory interviews designed to anticipate career lengthening in France. Design/methodology/approach: This exploratory approach is based on 26 interviews of French cadres (a mix of managers and professionals) aged 45 and over in the media agency sector. Findings: Two career scripts – one for the majority who perceive themselves in a dead end, and the other, more optimistic for those who experience job mobility – show several commonalities. Moreover, their combination suggests an entanglement with the previous business model of media agencies. Research limitations/implications: The survey was conducted on a non-random sample in a radically changing sector. However, the entanglement may explain the inertia with regard to changes in career scripts and agencies' business model. Practical implications: As these cadres need to work longer and move from traditional media expertise to cross-functional consulting capacity, mandatory interviews should be integrated into a human resources management strategy that fosters intra-organizational dynamics. Social implications: The lengthening of the professional life in France appears as a paradigm shift. The study of career sustainability in contexts becomes a critical research field for management development. Originality/value: The institutional approach of managers' careers is well developed, but there is a gap in understanding the entanglement of career scripts and business models. This may help address inertia in change processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine whether a long-term trend can be identified in the mobility regime of French society from the middle of the century. It begins with a review of the international literature on temporal trends in social fluidity within modern societies. Analysing recent French research which has concluded that inequality of opportunity has remained unchanged in France during the last two decades, the paper argues that such a conclusion can only have resulted from the use of insufficiently powerful statistical techniques. The second part of the paper analyses father-son and father-daughter mobility tables drawn from national representative surveys carried out in 1953, 1970, 1977, 1985 and 1993 (N=35,741 for males and 18,484 for females). The use of log-linear and log-multiplicative models reveals that the statistical association (as measured with the logarithm of the odds ratio) between social origin and destination has declined steadily by 0.5 % a year over a period of forty years. This finding highlights a slow but continuous trend towards a reduction in inequality of opportunity from the middle of the century. Of the twelve million French men and women between the ages of 35 and 59 who were in employment in 1993, nearly half a million would have belonged to different classes without this forty year increase in social fluidity. The paper concludes that the thesis of temporal invariance in the intergenerational mobility regime cannot be maintained for France, but that the reasons of this change still remain to be ascertained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on long-term ethnographic research with youth who were born to North, West, and East African families in northern Marseille, this article explores the common experience of alienation that practicing Muslims from Marseille report as they endeavor to live piously in their hometown, together with the mobility-oriented strategies they have devised to achieve belonging. Following these Muslim-Marseillais young adults longitudinally, it emerges that some relied on physical migration away from France (religiously conceived as hijrah) as a means of remaining pious and finding belonging. Others, meanwhile, navigated towards pious personhood and finding home in ways that still involved movement but transpired within France. Significantly, individuals who have chosen to remain in France carve out pious belonging by engaging in domestic movements to particular places in France, by pursuing occupational mobility, and by making advantageous use of prestigious linguistic registers like Standard French and Modern Standard Arabic. As such, the article suggests that hijrah is but one—and the most transnational—among various kinds of movement to which young Muslim-Marseillais turn as they grapple with discrimination, seek to improve themselves, and ascertain how best to belong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The voluntary mobility of employees who change employers for a better job remains an unexplored area of labour market transitions in many European countries. We analyse whether and how the recent great economic recession has contributed to modifications in such voluntary job mobility when employees have a temporary contract in France, Italy and Spain. We analyse cross-sectional data from the EU-SILC survey for two sub-periods: 2005–2008 and 2009–2015. We find that employees who have invested in human capital, who are young and who work more than 40 h per week are more likely than their counterparts to change employers for a better opportunity given a temporary contract. After the great recession, we observe a curbing of the studied voluntary job mobility that is likely attributable to the difficulty experienced by employees in finding a job that provides more benefits than their current one, with heterogeneous effects across socio-economic and demographic characteristics and the country of residence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many social scientists consider improvements in urban travel facilities during the last decades of the 20th century to have significantly weakened proximity constraints, and therefore think that home-workplace proximity is no longer a major factor in household location choice. They believe that better transport conditions give households more freedom in selecting their homes and workplaces, regardless of the distance separating these two locations. It is argued that this point of view underestimates the costs of daily commuting (which remain an increasing function of trip length), and consequently overestimates households' tolerance to commuting. The author's aim is to measure how much weight households give to home-workplace proximity in actual location choices. With the aid of survey data from the Paris-Île-de-France metropolitan area, two values are estimated: (i) the share of home and workplace changes (observed between 1991 and 2002) which either bring home and workplace closer to each other or keep these two places close to each other, and (ii) the 'life expectancy' of job-residence combinations which impose long-distance commutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the contribution of the technical school Ecoles d'Arts et Metiers to the formation of intermediate cadres in response to industrial growth and technological change in France from 1803-1914. Job history of the graduates; History of the schools and other technical schools, their programs and the attitudes of governments and industrialists toward them; Occupational mobility.

Analyzes INED longitudinal surveys which presents a reconstruction of the residential history of a cohort born between 1926 and 1935 and an evaluation of the role of the Paris region in the migration patterns of these generations. Advantages and challenges offered by longitudinal data; Residential mobility and career mobility; Diffusion of homeownership.