Early patterns of geographical mobility.
When young people are embarking on their working lives, should they move house (residential mobility) or commute (commuting mobility) to be able to work ? The more highy qualified young people are, the more they are tending to be faced with this alternative nowadays. Residential mobility is one of the main components of the transition to work process, since it concerns one young person out of every five. The two forms of mobility defined above are usually substitutable, although some young people have opted for both forms. Based on the results of Céreq's "Génération 98" survey, several forms of mobility (residential, commuting, inter- and intra-regional, short- and long-distance mobility) were distinguished, involving changes of employment district and not just changes of region or administrative department. The corresponding levels of qualification, types of employer, professions, and regions of origin are also identified.
Key Words
"Generation 98" survey, labour market, geographic mobility, training level, first-time employment, occupation, region
The effects of the regional context on youth transition to work.
The professional paths of young secondary school leavers depend on the local labour markets, which do not all function in the same way. The effects of the local context are two-fold. First there are the direct effects : whether or not young people's integration pathways take a favourable course depends not only on the region in which they underwent their vocational training, but also on the labour market situation, the sociodemographic environment and the structure of the training supply. There are also some indirect effects weighing on the individual transition to work factors : the effects of gender, the level of
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Early geographical mobility : the way to a successful career ?
Young higher educational graduates often have to move to another region at an early stage in their careers. However, the regions which gave these young people their training would like to keep them in their home territory. It is therefore fundamental to understand the underlying reasons for these migrations and their effects, especially as they are often thought to give people starting their working lives an extra asset. Geographical mobility seems to depend on young people's individual and family characteristics, and especially on the periods of mobility they have already undergone during their studies. On the other hand, the characteristics of the territories involved were found to play an equally fundamental role : young people, regardless of their individual backgrounds, now tend increasingly to leave both the agricultural and industrial regions and to move to those with low unemployment levels and those where there are large numbers of qualified jobs available. It turns out, however, that mobility is not always synonymous with greater professional success. The success rates actually depend strongly on the type of mobility and on the regions involved.
