Two PhD Candidates in the field of education and labour

You will work as a PhD student within the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA), one of the research departments of Maastricht University's School of Business and Economics (SBE). Extended research visits are foreseen at the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) in Bonn, which co-finances the PhD position. Both ROA and BIBB have a leading position nationally and internationally in research in the field of vocational education and the labour market. You will also be part of the Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE) that coordinates SBE’s PhD programme.

Both PhD projects focus on strategies to increase the resilience of workers and the sustainable employment in firms at the medium skills level of the labour market, that is, among people who will complete or have completed vocational education and training (VET). Although these workers still comprise the largest share of employment in most European countries, they suffer most from new developments in automation, digitalization, robotization and artificial intelligence (AI). The first project concerns the impact of training and hiring policies by frontier firms on the performance of non-frontier firms. The project explores the extent to which non-frontier firms profit or suffer from the hiring and VET policies of frontier firms (IBM, Volkswagen, etc.) that offer training programs based on the latest technological developments. The second project concerns the impact of the innovativeness of VET-programs on the resilience and sustainable employment of apprentices. The project explores the transitions to training and work of apprentices that are exposed to the above-mentioned technological developments.

You will be employed at the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA), but you will be also attached to various multidisciplinary research network projects and programs. These include the spearhead MORSE at the SBE, in particular the research themes on resilient labour markets and sustainable employment; the SBE flagship Technequality project at ROA and related ROA projects such as the interdisciplinary project on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the future of work ; and the BIBB topic clusters (1) Digital Transformation, (2) Company Decisions and Actions and (3) Vocational Orientation and Transitions.