Occupational Careers and Job Interruptions: On Methodological Issues of Constructing Long Trajectories

This study uses the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN 1988-2013 to showcase methodological issues of converting panel data into career trajectories. Three metrics are proposed to describe career trajectories: calendar year, age of respondent, and subsequent career year starting from the first job. I present the POLPAN data in each of these metrics and discuss their benefits and limitations. The article then deals with the issue of selecting a single job that best describes the respondent's occupational position when the respondent holds two or more different jobs. One possible solution is to select a single job using an original five-step algorithm. The problem of multiple jobs can also be solved by defining the career trajectory through occupational scales. A total of six such scales are available in POLPAN. The study further shows how data on career trajectories can be supplemented with data about job interruptions caused by unemployment, birth of a child, military service, or other reasons. A separate section is devoted to Converter-2015, a computer application that converts the original wide-format POLPAN data to the long format required in longitudinal analyses. I also propose an additional new "presentation" format, which helps identify job career patterns. The paper ends with a discussion of data quality issues.