Measuring Career Mobility: An Empirical Comparison of Six Mobility Indexes

The current paper presents six indexes that can be used to characterize the course of a career during a particular time interval, respectively, (1) the total number of transitions during that interval; (2) the number of positive transitions; (3) the number of negative transitions; (4) the subtraction of the number of negative transitions from the number of positive transitions; (5) the relative uncommonness of the transitions; and (6) the subtraction of the number of negative transitions from the number of positive transitions, weighted by their uncommonness. Advantages and disadvantages of these six indexes are discussed. Further, an empirical example is presented that draws on data from a sample of 357 employed Dutch youth. Finally, our approach is compared to previous approaches (event-centered methods, such as survival analysis, and career-centered methods, such as clustering techniques). It is concluded that our simple approach complements these other approaches well.