What about us? A vignette study explaining training preferences by contract type and skill specificity

Abstract

This article presents a vignette experiment conducted in the Netherlands to study workers’ training preferences. Human capital theory, signalling theory and insights from the “new employment relationship” inform the hypothesis that training preferences depend on the specificity of the skills targeted by training in combination with employment contract type. The results confirm this hypothesis and indicate that, although workers on open-ended contracts have a stronger relative preference for organization-specific skills than temporary workers - who have a stronger relative preference for general skills - all workers prefer training aimed at general over organization-specific skills. Workers on temporary contracts are moreover found to receive less training in practice than they would like.