Leiden, Netherlands, 17 November 2025 – Workers tend to misjudge how easily they could switch occupations, preliminary research presented by Armando Miano at a SkiLMeeT webinar showed.
In the online event on 13 November, attended by 25 participants, Miano of the University of Naples Federico II outlined joint work with Pascal Heß of the IAB. Their study examines how workers think about moving between occupations, how well-informed they are about opportunities elsewhere, how transferable they believe their skills are, and how they assess the costs of switching.
Drawing on an online survey of around 4,500 employees and rich administrative data, the researchers found that workers often underestimate how similar other occupations are to their own and the wage gains they could achieve by switching. At the same time, they tend to overestimate licensing and retraining requirements. They also understate the share of tasks in their job that could be automated or affected by climate policy and the green transition.
The team also ran an experiment to test how information shapes workers’ decisions. Early evidence suggests that when employees receive concrete details about viable alternative occupations, they become more open to changing jobs and more likely to search for opportunities in those fields.
