Geographies of Occupational Attainment

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

How a worker comes to claim a particular occupation in a particular place, or how a place comes to contain a cadre of workers with a particular occupation, are vitally important economic and social questions. This research takes an institutional approach to the individual's gaining and using occupation-specific skills and to the local availability of occupation-specific labor. The objective of the research project is to compare the sources (by type and location) of computer programmers' training across regions, industrial sectors, and personal characteristics. The research will first use secondary data such as censuses to investigate the relationships between rates of occupational attainment and various institutional factors for all Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the United States. Case studies of five mid-sized metropolitan areas with a high proportion of programmers will be made via phone and in-person interviews with key employers and institutional leaders. The key questions to be investigated are: sex and race; current employment arrangement and tenure; approximate age and location at which the individual gained original training as a programmer; motivations for occupational and locational choices; earlier careers and parents' occupations; and incidence and sponsorship of further training. The information from both types of interviews will be used to relate local characteristics of labor-force size, employer size, employment practices, and growth rates to the locations and ways in which programmers gained and maintained their skills. For anyone in the labor force, one's occupation and one's location largely determine one's employment outcomes. For the region, the local availability of trained workers is key to local economic well-being. This project provides an understanding of the general process between location and occupational attainment. In addition, the proposed project selects one particular occupation, computer programmer, that has been the object of much interest and debate. The contribution of the proposed research lies in its combination of: recognition of institutional influences on individual behavior and regional outcomes; attention to training and migration decisions; attention to the paths of women and minorities within an occupation dominated by white men; and secondary data for all metropolitan regions as well as exploratory, interview data in five specific regions.