Joint work with Dr Jan Skopek & Francesca Burato (Lead: Marco Seegers)
Lifelong learning is a core policy ideal in modern societies, yet participation remains highly unequal. Those with higher qualifications and prior learning experience are far more likely to take part—while others, often with the greatest need, are left behind. This project explores the potential role of metacognitive monitoring—the ability to assess one’s own knowledge and recognise learning needs—in helping to explain this divide.
Drawing on the Dunning–Kruger effect, we examine whether individuals with low cognitive competencies and inflated self-assessments are especially unlikely to engage in adult education. We conceptualise this as a micro-cognitive mechanism of the theory of cumulative (dis)advantage, helping to explain how small initial differences compound into persistent inequalities in learning over the life course.
Our study focuses on Germany and considers both formal, work-related training and the growing role of informal and digital learning environments. By linking cognitive psychology with sociological theory, we aim to deepen the understanding of how metacognitive competencies influence lifelong learning trajectories. The findings have practical implications for policy, counselling, and curriculum design in adult education.
Joint work with Julia Hufnagl & Mortimer Schlieker (Lead: Marco Seegers)
In a world shaped by technological change and demographic ageing, lifelong learning is essential for keeping skills up to date and careers on track. Further training in adulthood is often promoted as a “second chance” to improve job prospects, especially for those who have faced disadvantages in education or taken career breaks. In practice, however, access to job-related training is far from equal. Those in stable, well-paid jobs are most likely to benefit, while people in precarious positions often remain excluded.
In this study, we examine how gender and migration background combine to shape access to employer-supported training — non-formal courses, workshops, or seminars that are at least partly funded by the employer or take place during working hours. In Germany, this form of training accounts for more than three-quarters of all adult training activities, with employers acting as key gatekeepers deciding who participates.
Using long-term data from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we analyse two stages in this process:
Access to companies that offer employer-supported training.
Selection for training within those companies.
By showing how organisational structures and social positions influence training opportunities, this study asks whether lifelong learning is truly a second chance for everyone — or whether it risks reinforcing existing inequalities.
Joint work with Viktor Decker (Lead: Viktor Decker)
In this paper, we examine how non-formal, employer-supported further training shapes career stability for workers with different educational backgrounds. The project builds on the long-standing debate about the trade-offs between vocational and general education. While vocational graduates typically enjoy smoother school-to-work transitions, these early advantages often fade over time, potentially turning into disadvantages as occupation-specific skills become obsolete. General graduates may face more difficulties entering the labour market, but tend to retain greater adaptability to changing job demands.
We address a key gap in the literature: existing studies largely focus on differences in training participation, but rarely ask whether the returns to training differ between educational groups and how these returns evolve over the career. Our analysis focuses on non-formal further training such as professionally supervised workshops, seminars, or courses, which update and expand existing skills and can be certified.
We hypothesise that training has stronger stabilising effects early in the career for general graduates, who need to compensate for a lack of occupation-specific skills, and greater returns later in life for vocational graduates, for whom training can counter skill obsolescence. Using high-quality longitudinal data from the adult cohort of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), we track career outcomes such as unemployment, downward occupational mobility, and marginalised employment across three education groups: secondary-level vocational, tertiary-level vocational, and general university education.
Single-authored
Many advanced economies face ageing populations, shrinking workforces, and rising competition for skilled labour. At the same time, digital transformation accelerates the pace at which skills become obsolete, widening the gap between the qualifications workers have and those employers need. Further training in adulthood is widely seen as a key tool to address these mismatches. Yet it remains unclear whether occupational skill shortages encourage greater participation in training —or whether they constrain training opportunities by increasing workloads and reducing available resources.
This study tests two competing mechanisms:
Upskilling hypothesis: Firms facing recruitment difficulties invest more in internal training to compensate for hiring constraints.
Shortage-constraint hypothesis: Severe shortages discourage training due to higher workloads and fewer resources.
Drawing on high-quality longitudinal data from the adult cohort of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), the research focuses on Germany’s occupation-based skill formation system, in which the state and social partners jointly coordinate vocational education and training. While initial education is highly regulated, further training is largely market-driven, dominated by non-formal formats, and often organised or financed by employers.
The issue is pressing: by 2040, Germany’s working-age population will decline by more than three million, with acute shortages expected in health, education, and ICT. Vacancy rates for skilled jobs already reach 45 percent, while 19 percent of young adults lack vocational qualifications. Understanding how skill shortages affect further training participation is therefore crucial.
Joint work with Dr Eileen Peters & Mortimer Schlieker (Lead: Mortimer Schlieker)
This paper examines how an employee’s relative earnings position – their salary compared to colleagues in the same workplace and to their partner within the household – influences access to non-formal, job-related training. Building on Relational Inequality Theory, we interpret these earnings gaps as indicators of social positioning in two central spheres: the workplace, where employers act as gatekeepers to training opportunities, and the family, where household dynamics and divisions of labour can either enable or restrict participation.
Wwe use linked employer–employee data from Germany and apply longitudinal fixed-effects models to analyse how changes in these relative earnings positions affect the likelihood of training activities. Our approach captures both workplace and family effects simultaneously and allows us to examine how they interact over the life course.
The paper’s key innovation lies in the simultaneous analysis of workplace and family spheres and the interactions between them. This relational perspective enables us to move beyond studying training barriers in isolation, revealing how dynamics in one sphere can reinforce or offset those in the other. The findings will contribute to a deeper theoretical understanding of relational inequality and generate evidence that can inform targeted strategies to improve training access for underrepresented groups.
Joint work with Stefan Udelhofen (Lead: Marco Seegers)
This paper examines how gender disparities in non-formal, job-related further training have evolved in Germany over the past three decades. While lifelong learning policies across Europe frame participation as a matter of individual choice and economic necessity, empirical evidence shows persistent – yet shifting – inequalities, particularly along gender lines.
Our study addresses the lack of a systematic, historically informed synthesis of the Gender Training Gap in Germany. Drawing on an integrative, quantitative literature review, we link trends in training participation to macro-level institutional transformations and policy reforms in education, labour markets, and family policy. Germany’s coordinated market economy and collective skill formation system provide a distinctive – yet internationally instructive – context for exploring these dynamics.
The article offers the first comprehensive overview of the Gender Training Gap in non-formal further training in Germany, develops a historically grounded analytical framework, and contributes to wider debates on gender and training inequalities in comparative perspective.
Joint work with Johanna Binnewitt (Lead: Johanna Binnewitt)
We investigate how Members of the German Bundestag talk about occupational groups – and how such references often carry implicit images, evaluations, and social roles. Drawing on the complete plenary protocols, we analyse how different professions are portrayed, which social characteristics are attributed to them, and what kinds of stereotypes may be embedded in the language of political debate.
Our approach combines sociological and social-psychological theoretical perspectives with computational linguistics, drawing in particular on the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) and the Spontaneous Stereotype Content Model (SSCM). We manually annotate selected debate excerpts to capture attributes such as age, gender, socio-economic status, competence, and warmth from the speakers’ perspective, and then use these annotations to train machine learning models. This allows us to explore alternative ways of identifying and measuring occupational stereotypes that are otherwise difficult to capture empirically.
The project aims to shed light on how political discourse conveys and potentially reinforces occupational stereotypes – and to develop new methodological pathways for detecting such implicit representations in large-scale text data. These methods also have the potential to be extended to other types of texts beyond parliamentary debates.