Comparing tasks of 160 occupations across eight European countries
Abstract
Purpose
Do similar job titles refer to the same work activities, as assumed often, but hardly empirically tested? The purpose of this paper is to analyze the similarity of 160 occupations within and across eight European countries using interrater agreement statistics (rWG).
Design/methodology/approach
Using a multilingual web survey, experts and jobholders in the eight countries rated the frequency of ten tasks per occupation they had knowledge of (n=4,197 ratings). Three hypotheses are investigated: first, interrater agreements of occupations are similar regardless the country; second, interrater agreements of occupations are similar within countries; and third, experts and jobholders are similar in their ratings.
Findings
Half of the occupations reveal no agreement across ratings, one-third shows a weak/moderate agreement and one in ten shows a strong agreement. H1 is rejected for task frequency but not for task importance. Within-country similarity of occupations is larger than across-country similarity. H2 is supported for two countries and rejected for two other countries. H3 is not supported. Jobholders demonstrate higher agreement than experts.
Research limitations/implications
An empirical testing of occupation-specific tasks for a wide range of occupations across Europe seems a viable approach.
Practical implications
The paper contributes to the challenges related to labor market mobility across borders.
Originality/value
Work tasks for a wide range of occupations and countries, using job-specific work activities in combination with web surveys and the internet for recruitment of jobholders, have not been used before.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the FP6 research program of the European Commission for providing a grant to the EurOccupations project “Developing a detailed seven-country occupations database for comparative socio-economic research in the European Union” (FP6-028987) and the Department of Social Sciences of Erasmus University Rotterdam for a grant for writing this paper. The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information in this particular or in any other publication or communication related to the EurOccupations project. These funders have neither participated in the design, nor the analyses or the results of the project. The authors thank all members of the EurOccupations project team for their efforts to recruit experts and they thank particularly Yves de Weerdt and Joyce Jacobs for their contributions to the data collection. Information about the project, its publications and the data set can be found on www.eurocupations.org
Citation
G. Tijdens, K., De Ruijter, E. and De Ruijter, J. (2014), "Comparing tasks of 160 occupations across eight European countries", Employee Relations, Vol. 36 No. 2, pp. 110-127. https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-05-2013-0046
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited