How Does Vocational Training Impact Job Seekers’ Professional Transitions? (In French)
Working Paper Series no. 985. Does vocational training help reduce structural imbalances in the labor market? We construct a new measure of occupational distance by applying a natural language processing algorithm to a large sample of job offers. Using this new measure of occupational distance we find that the effect of training on re-employment is driven by re-employment in occupations which are distant (in terms of skills) from job seekers’ original occupations. From a purely reallocative point of view, however, the effect of vocational training on the return to employment does not appear to be driven by re-employment in tight occupations. Our results rely on a conditional independence assumption and should therefore be interpreted with caution.