Information Intervention During Apprenticeship Search and Occupational Choices of Apprenticeship Applicants

We investigate how a short, low-cost information intervention impacts the gender-typicality of adolescents’ occupational choices. For that purpose, we run a field experiment with a large private job board for apprenticeship positions in Switzerland. Users of the job board that are registered and logged-in will be randomly assigned to either a treatment or control group. Members of the treatment group will receive a gender-specific information treatment with (a) information on gender-atypical occupations (STEM occupations for women; health and care occupations for men) and (b) video material on role models in these occupations. Members of the control group will not receive an information treatment. Afterwards, we observe the apprenticeship occupations for which adolescents in the treatment group and in the control group apply for.

2021-09-01

2022-04-01

Our primary outcome of interest is the occupational choice of apprenticeship applicants, i.e. they apply on the job board for apprenticeships at firms and we study whether the occupations of these applications are gender-typically male or female occupations. Specifically, we are interested in whether adolescents apply for gender-atypical occupations.

The occupational choice of apprenticeship applicants will be operationalized by adolescents’ real-life applications for apprenticeship positions in either typically female or typically male occupations. The application data we will use is the full universe of process generated data provided to us by the job board.

Additionally, we may be able to observe the applicants' information search after the intervention and/or the person-occupation fit in order to learn more about the mechanism of the effect (if made available by the job board, which is not clear yet).

We conduct the field experiment among German speaking Swiss adolescents who apply via one of the most important job boards for apprenticeship positions. The field experiment is conducted in cooperation with a large private online job board for apprenticeship positions in Switzerland. Randomization is carried out by the job board at the individual level, using a computer-based randomization.
The experiment is designed as follows:
Registered, logged-in, and German speaking users of the job board will be assigned with p=0.5 between the two treatment groups.
We will estimate treatment effects for different subsamples of students. Specifically we will test treatment heterogeneity by:
- Gender
- Type of job advertisement: (a) advertisement of trial apprenticeships (German: “Schnupperlehren”); (b) advertisement of regular apprenticeship positions
- Age
- Region of the applicants’ residence
- Previous test results of applicants (if made available by job board, which is not clear yet)

Not available

Randomization is carried out by the apprenticeship job board at the individual level, using a computer.

individual

No

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approx. 6,000 individuals (We estimate the number of observations in the following way: In 2020 198,000 applications were sent via the job board. Therefore, within the approx. six months during which our intervention will be implemented, about 99’000 applications can be expected. Because the average user sends 6 applications, we expect to observe applications of around 16,000 users. Of these 16,000 users we expect that about 40% are German-speaking and were already registered and visited the job board before applying.

approx. 3,000 control, approx. 3,000 information treatments