The purpose of this research is to shed light on whether graduates’ part-time and full-time work activities, related or not to the field of study, influence employment and job quality outcomes after graduation.

The issue of youth employability has gained relevance among policymakers and in the public environment, especially after the last economic crisis of 2008, which severely affected employment rates and job quality. Indeed, some students might have decided to obtain a job before graduation due to their family’s financial constraints, possibly accepting low-skilled jobs. On the other hand, although the economic downturn mostly hit low-skilled workers, labour market outcomes for recent university graduates have become much more unstable, which raises the question of what mechanisms exist to improve their employability during the transition from university to work. When the market becomes tighter and more competitive, investing in additional skills (on top of those acquired as part of the degree) might improve subsequent labour market performance. This is actually, apart from economic needs, the main rationale behind the increasing prevalence of work activities before degree completion, as well as behind the growing number of internship programmes provided by various academic institutions, which are intended to be beneficial for students, especially when related to the content of their studies.

This research exploits the information contained in two different surveys conducted both among graduates from Catalan universities (available for different years and containing very detailed information), and graduates from universities located across all of Spain’s autonomous communities. With regard to employability measures, this research focuses on three relevant aspects that characterize the labour market performance of young university graduates: their likelihood of having a job, of securing a permanent contract, and of working in a post that requires their specific university degree, four years after their graduation.

As mentioned above, two different databases have been used, one including graduates from Catalan universities and the other including graduates from the whole of Spain. The rationale for this choice is that the database that covers graduates from Catalan universities includes detailed student information for several years, which makes it possible to deal with the estimation issues that could affect the causal interpretation of the results with advanced techniques. Nonetheless, the results with estimation methods applied to graduates from the whole of Spain have also been reported, thus providing evidence that the results relating to graduates from Catalan universities can be extrapolated to the whole of Spain.

It can be seen that working while studying for a university degree is quite common among Spanish university graduates, especially in Catalonia, where most graduates who combined work activities and studies had a part-time job related to their field of study. This motivates analysis of whether pre-graduation work activities affect post-graduation employability, considering both working intensity and the relationship with the degree’s contents.

In an initial level of analysis, the techniques applied consider the effect of different student characteristics that may influence the results (age, gender, parental education, type of studies, etc.).

The evidence obtained indicates that working before graduating improves the chances of getting a job in the four years after graduation. The probability of having a permanent position is also higher, especially for those who have worked full time. The possibilities of working in an area related to the subject studied only improve if the work done pre-graduation was related with the studies that were undertaken. In contrast, working in something unrelated to the subjects studied increases the chances of ultimately working in fields also unrelated to them. It is worth mentioning that the results of the research, in this sense, are qualitatively the same for both Catalan and Spanish graduates.

Given this initial evidence, the analysis makes use of more advanced techniques that also enable capture of those unobserved characteristics of the students (e.g. motivation, aspirations, skills, etc.). These characteristics might be related to both propensity to work before graduation and to post-graduation outcomes, thus affecting the results of the study. This analysis requires additional information that is only available in the data from Catalan universities, which will be therefore the focus of this additional piece of evidence. The results obtained, which can be more plausibly interpreted in causal terms, confirm the beneficial effect of work activities on the probability of being employed, in the case of work activities related to the field of study. Moreover, full-time work activities not related to the field of study no longer affect the chances of having a permanent contract. Finally, this model confirms previous results regarding the higher risk of being mismatched in the labour market for graduates who were working in jobs unrelated to their field of study during their academic career, whereas the effects of pre-graduation jobs related to their degree are imprecisely estimated.

The results of this research indicate that graduates who have worked while studying, compared to those who did not work while enrolled at the university, have better chances of being employed four years after graduation and are more likely to secure a permanent contract. However, it has been detected that not all pre-graduation work activities are rewarded in the same way in the labour market. In particular, having a job related to one’s degree before graduation improves employability chances and job quality alike, whereas graduates employed in jobs unrelated to their field of study face a higher risk of being mismatched in the labour market after completing their university degree. This result is even more pronounced when the unobservable factors behind the decision to work while studying (e.g. motivation, aspirations, skills) are taken into account, but these can only be considered with the data for graduates from Catalan universities.

The evidence reported in this study highlights that what really matters for post-graduation employability is pre-graduation work activity related to the field of study, which favours the acquisition of skills and experience that are subsequently better rewarded in the labour market. This evidence suggests that academic policymakers and universities should promote the combination of formal learning with work activities that are well matched to degree course contents.

This empirical analysis combines information from two different databases: the “Encuesta de inserción laboral de titulados universitarios” of 2014 (conducted by the Agencia Nacional de Evaluación de la Calidad y Acreditación – ANECA – and the Instituto Nacional de Estadística – INE), a survey covering Spanish university graduates from different universities around the country who obtained their degree in 2010; and the “Encuesta de inserción laboral de los graduados y graduadas de las universidades catalanas” of 2011, 2014 and 2017 (conducted by AQU Catalunya), a survey covering graduates who completed their studies four years previously. Both databases contain information about work activities before graduation, classified in a slightly different way. However, the first of these two surveys contains limited information on graduates’ characteristics in comparison with the database related to Catalan universities. Also, the Spanish and Catalan databases employ different definitions for some variables, therefore the comparability of the results obtained from the two should be viewed with some caution. Finally, the analysis considers only students from public universities, because not all of the relevant information is available for private universities.

Agència per a la Qualitat del Sistema Universitari de Catalunya (2011, 2014 y 2017): Inserció laboral de graus.

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Instituto Nacional de Estadística (2014): Encuesta de Inserción Laboral de Titulados Universitarios.

NEYT, B., E. OMEY, D. VERHAEST and S. BAERT (2019): "Does student work really affect educational outcomes? A review of the literature", Journal of Economic Surveys, 33(3).

SÁNCHEZ‐GELABERT, A., M. FIGUEROA and M. ELIAS (2017): "Working whilst studying in higher education: The impact of the economic crisis on academic and labour market success", European Journal of Education, 52(2).

"The Impact of Combining Work with Study on the Labour Market Performance of Graduates: the Joint Role of Work Intensity and Job-Field Match" (Working paper).