The main analysis is performed on a sample of 70651 observations from three waves of the Canadian Survey of Longitudinal Income Dynamics (SLID) data. We use information on occupations, skills, and field of study from the Career Handbook, a Canadian version of O*NET, the American Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Matching information from the Career Handbook with individual records in the SLID, we study the extent of the match between field of study and subsequent working occupations, as well as the link between field of study, career mobility, and the type of skill (analytical ability, spatial perception, etc.) required by each occupation as determined by the Canadian Career Handbook.
Because SLID uses the Major Field of Study (MFS) to encode the field, while the Career Handbook uses the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) instead, we also use the Canadian 2005 Census, where fields are encoded in both ways, to construct a cross-walk from MFS to CIP.
For each individual–year pair we generate a direct measure of the match between the field of study associated with the occupation and the respondent's MFS field of study. With the match probability as the dependent variable, and controlling for a host of other characteristics including demographics and industry, we conduct several OLS and panel regression analyses, with primary interest in the field of study indicators.
The probability of a positive field match increases with respondents' education and parental education. Being an immigrant, or even a second generation immigrant, has a negative effect on the match probability. In terms of the skills required by the workers' occupations, most fields of study are positively associated with the general aptitudes demanded by the workers' occupations, with some exceptions. Women seem to work in lower aptitude jobs, except for verbal and clerical skills. A bachelor's degree, and in particular a post-graduate degree, are very strongly associated with higher job skills, in particular verbal and numerical ones, and lower skill jobs in terms of motor and physical skills. Upon an occupation change, fields such as arts and humanities are associated with increased aptitudes in the new job requirement, making a case for the transferability of skill imparted by education.