Sustaining the employability of the low skilled worker: development, mobility and work redesign

This PhD thesis focuses on three strategies to sustain employability: development (i.e. adjusting one’s knowledge base), mobility (i.e. changing jobs) and work redesign (i.e. making adjustments to the current job). Less educated employees make relatively little use of these three options. This is due to a lack of confidence – for example in their ability to successfully complete a training course or find a new job. Positive experiences help to build this confidence. New HR tools do not appear to be required to achieve this. Instead, access to existing tools should be improved, for example by making them more ‘small-scale’, though they should by no means be small in scope. It turns out that successive reorganisations make it even harder to remedy any perceived skills shortages. Only extensive training will help less educated employees to recover from perceived skills shortages. The findings in this PhD thesis have formed the basis for a number of intervention programmes developed by the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, such as ‘Vitaal Vakmanschap’ (‘Thriving Professionals’) and ‘Taken van de Toekomst’ (‘Tomorrow’s Tasks’).