Constrained choice? Graduate early career job-to-job mobility in core and non-core regions in the Netherlands

We investigate job-switch strategies of graduates from Dutch HEIs resding in core and non-core areas: to what extent are residential and workplace mobility coupled with switches across industrial sectors? Registry data from Statistics Netherlands enables us to track graduation cohorts from seven years prior to eighteen years following graduation. Overall, the likelihood of labour market dynamics varies strongly with the life-phase in which we find graduates. We find that, like migration, job mobility is not a random event. It occurs, in some cases, repeatedly, to specific groups who appear to operate at the edges of the job opportunity space. We find that sector and workplace mobility appear contemporarily positively interrelated, persistent, but also intertemporally competing. Residential mobility appears somewhat disconnected from labour market dynamics, although it appears that some wait for a match to come to fruition before changing residences. Mobility is higher across the board for graduates residing in non-core areas, with non-core singles found to be relatively mobile. We demonstrate that it is not the presence of a partner as such that limits spatial mobility, but whether or not he or she is economically active. Controlling for this, and contrary to what is often reported in migration literature, we find that couples without children, living in non-core areas, are more likely to exhibit residential mobility than singles. They are also more likely to engage in sectoral and workplace mobility. Non-core couples with children are also found more likely to engage in residential mobility than singles