The main purpose of this paper is twofold. The first part serves as a literature overview for determinants of participation in work-related formal training. The second part of this paper will analyze these determinants and look for significant others using German panel data.
The literature overview combines the different approaches by researchers in order to create a list of determinants of training participation. This list contains person related determinants, job related determinants, and employer related determinants as well as other determinants that cannot be allocated to these three groups. This summary of the literature serves to facilitate further investigations of determinants of training.
For this analysis the 2008 wave of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) is used. OLS and probit-regressions will be run in order to discover if the determinants and correlations found in literature are valid for Germany. This investigation of determinants from German panel data focuses on work-related and employer-related training. Only participants who are employed and not retired will be considered for the analysis. For the purpose of this work, self-employed individuals and those who are not trainees at the moment of the survey will excluded.
Furthermore, this paper includes health related determinants and their influence on the participation in training. The relationship between health and training has not been investigated thoroughly in past research and will be another contribution of this paper. Differences between the traditional determinants with and without controlling for health will be compared. To conclude, the findings from this paper will be compared with findings from the literature in order to see differences and similarities.
This paper is set out in the following way. Section 2 will explain the broader meaning of training within the life course. Section 3 will show the different studies and the results reported by prior academic literature in a clear list. In Section 4 the listed determinants will be described in a more detailed way. Section 5 then will analyze the influence of person related determinants, job related determinants and employer related determinants as well as controlling for health. A final conclusion will compare findings from the literature with the findings from this paper and suggest further ideas for research.