‘One improves here every day’: the occupational and learning journeys of ‘lower-skilled’ European migrants in the London region

Abstract

This paper examines narratives of learning and occupational advancement amongst migrants employed in 'low-skilled' jobs, based on in-depth interviews with secondary-educated East and South Europeans living in the London region. Our findings indicate that many achieved varying degrees of professional gratification, progress, and skills development within occupational sectors typically associated with unattractive conditions, limited benefits or opportunities to get ahead. Participants' narratives of achievement expand the relatively limited literature that challenges common perceptions of occupational mobility and professional development as the terrain of the 'highly skilled'. Furthermore, we examine how migrants made sense of their career opportunities and success. We discuss two discourses, centred on 'hard work' and 'creativity' respectively, through which participants challenged and reconfigured traditional 'high'-'lowskilled' divides. Our findings contribute to critiques of traditional understandings of migrant human capital and simplistic 'high'-'low-skilled' distinctions in two ways: by documenting the less visible experiences of learning and career progress amongst secondary-educated European youth who enter 'low-skilled' employment abroad, and by calling attention to subjective understandings of occupational mobility and the new 'symbolic boundaries' around skills, broadly construed, that migrants redrew in their reflections on career progress.

Introduction to the Special Issue: European youth migration: human capital outcomes, skills and competences

“…Formal and informal skills combine, and the latter can be even more important for the employability and personal success of young migrants. Learning is not limited to formal education; it takes place at work, including the lowskilled working environments (Moroşanu et al 2019), through socialisation (Grabowska and Jastrzebowska 2019) or within the private sphere of the home (Williams 2006). Younger-age migrants also have the propensity to engage in multiple migrations (i.e.…”

“…Some of these competences are being categorised as the social dimensions of human capital (Grabowska and Jastrzebowska 2019). Moroşanu et al (2019) demonstrate how migrants with lower formal education utilise a wider range of skills, beyond that their qualifications or occupations might indicate, to advance in the labour market, including generic skills such as creativity and work ethic. Hence, we argue that soft skills and competences that stem from migration experience should be included in the notion of 'total human capital' (Li et al 1996).…”

“…These databases provide unique insights into the transferability of human capital in the context of the nine project-partner countries. The papers presented in this Special Issue offer a range of methodological approaches, using qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods; a particular feature is that some papers present a pan-European analysis (Janta et al 2019;McGarry et al 2019), others a two-country comparative analysis (Staniscia et al 2019) or single country cases (Moroşanu et al 2019;Baláž et al 2019;Emilsson and Mozetič 2019;Aksakal and Schmidt 2019), probing deeper into novel questions of human capital. The two studies outside of the YMOBILITY project (Palovic, Janta, and Williams 2019; Grabowska and Jastrzębowska 2019) focus on single country cases; Slovakia and Poland, utilising multiple data sources.…”

“…The focus here is on returnees in different contexts and human capital gains among circular migrants and other mobile groups. Four articles focus on under-studied contexts: examining return migration and its interrelations to location within Southern Europe by comparing returnees' occupational experiences in Italy and Spain (Staniscia et al 2019); exploring trajectories of 'lower-skilled' young migrants in the London region (Moroşanu et al 2019); and examining destination countries with rather highly regulated labour markets, in Sweden (Emilsson and Mozetič 2019) and Germany (Aksakal and Schmidt, 2019). Two articles, both outside of the YMOBILITY project, seek to embed the young migrants' experiences in a broader economic and social canvas: employers, as opposed to the young migrants' perspectives in Slovakia (Palovic, Janta, and Williams 2019) utilising qualitative data; and migration-related skills, both individual and social, contributing to an understanding of the spill-over effects of knowledge transfer after return in Poland (Grabowska and Jastrzębowska 2019) using both quantitative and qualitative data.…”

“…The key contribution here is a conceptualisation and operationalisation of the relationship between knowledge and skills. Moroşanu et al (2019) examine narratives of occupational mobility and skills development amongst 'medium-educated' migrants in the London region. They show how participants acquire and use a variety of valuable technical and non-technical skills, which may help them advance occupationally.…”