Training and its impact on the casual employment experience
By Hielke Buddelmeyer, Felix Leung, Mark Wooden
Research report
12 มิถุนายน 2013
ISBN 978 1 922056 55 9
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Description
The proportion of people who are employed casually has been stable over the last 15 years at around 20% of the working-age population. For most, casual employment is a relatively temporary state. There are some though for whom casual employment is a more enduring state. Does undertaking work-related training help those who are casually employed move into permanent or fixed-term work? And does such training have any impact on the level of satisfaction casually employed people have with their jobs, employment opportunities and life in general? Using data from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, this report investigates these issues. The authors find the impact of training per se on helping to move individuals from casual employment to more permanent work was minimal, as was the impact of training on an individual's satisfaction with their job or life.
Summary
About the research
About one in five adult Australians is employed on a casual rather than an ongoing or permanent basis. From the point of view of skills acquisition, casual workers tend to participate less in work-related training than their permanently employed counterparts.
The focus of this research is whether the lower rate of participation in work-related training is an issue. Does undertaking training help those who are casually employed to move into permanent or fixed-term work? Further, does training have any impact on the level of satisfaction casually employed people have with their jobs, employment opportunities and life in general? These issues are investigated using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.
Key messages
Casual workers are less likely to participate in work-related training than those in permanent or fixed-term employment.
There is little evidence that receiving work-related training affects the probability of moving into permanent or fixed-term employment.
The apparent finding that casual workers who undertake work-related training are more likely to move into permanent or fixed-term work than those who do not becomes invalid when the panel nature of the data is exploited to account for unobserved differences between those receiving and those not receiving training.
There is also little evidence of any strong impacts of work-related training on the level of satisfaction reported by casual workers with their job or life.
The exception to this is satisfaction with employment opportunities among casually employed women.
The apparent lack of benefits from training is not surprising, given that casual workers are generally employed on short tenures, thus limiting the value of training to both the employees and employers.