Occupational and educational biographies of older workers and their participation in further education in Germany

The adult cohort of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) provides data from six sets of longitudinal data derived from 11,932 German adults. We used the NEPS data to look at the effects of formal education in adulthood and occupational changes on participation in further vocational education and training in order to gain a better understanding of learning activities of older workers. This data enables us to differentiate between upward mobility, downwards mobility and changes at the same level of occupation. In a multi-regression-analysis we control for well-documented predictors such as level of schooling and vocational education, job status, gender and age as well as for company size. Descriptive results confirm the expected effects, but these effects disappear when the other variables are taken into account.