Intermediate skills and occupational mobility

Abstract

’Intermediate occupations’ describes broadly the range of occupations below the rank of professional and management jobs and above the partly skilled and unskilled occupations and includes craft, technical and supervisory occupations. These are largely differentiated by the levels of education and skill required for entry, the supervisory and technical functions performed within them and the income and standing associated with them. This paper attempts to operationalise the concept of intermediate occupations and draws on two major longitudinal datasets to examine both the extent of mobility and the characteristics of those who move in and out of the intermediate occupation category: the New Earnings Survey Panel Dataset and the National Child Development Study. Against the background of an expansion of the non‐craft intermediate occupations and a contraction of the craft occupations, longitudinal analysis revealed movement upwards from ‘other’ occupations into the non‐craft jobs in increasing numbers for the young cohorts and movement downwards into other occupations from craft occupations, especially among men. Mobile individuals were characterised by extended education, modern employment skills, such as computing, organising and finance, and in the case of women, work‐based training. It is concluded that the range of occupations in the intermediate category is so heterogeneous and the patterns of mobility and their attributed causes are so diverse that policy and programmes targeted at this particular category are likely to be unfocused. There is much to be said for maintaining analytic distinctions between the craft and non‐craft types of intermediate occupation and especially between the different types of job typically held by men and women.