Occupational specificity and employment opportunities. The significance ofjob training for entry into the labor market

Allocation processes in the German labor market are regulated to a great ex tent by vocational (and academic) credentials. Yet the impact of the high d egree of occupational specificity characterizing these certificates on the interrelation between training and job remains empirically unclear. This ar ticle focuses on the question as to how far access to jobs and positions in the German labor market is tied to these "content-specific" certificates. In order to reconstruct the principles of assigning labor market chances to individuals, the connection between vocational training and job found are analyzed according to two separate dimensions. The first is hierarchical an d relates tb the connection between the achieved level of training and the position obtained. The second is horizontal and focuses on the occupational specificity of labor market allocation processes. The theoretical part of the article-discusses the institutional differentiation of the German vocat ional training system and the impact of formalized vocational credentials a s well as the "social construction" of occupations on social rigidity. Base d on empirical analyses it is the intention of this article to answer the q uestion as to how far labor market chances are "occupationalized" and to wh at extent this feature has changed over the past decades.