Often, the choices young people make on their pathways from school to postschool education are conceptualized in institutional terms by distinguishing different school tracks or types, or vocational training and university studies. What is often neglected is the role of occupations in this process, i.e. the occupational interests that adolescents pursue, the occupations they aspire to, and the occupations they end up in training and employment later on. These career choice processes are important developmental steps for young people, and at the same time, the occupation trained for plays a central role in setting the course for career opportunities in adult life. Hence, occupations structure the transition to work to a strong extent and play a key role in the (re)production of social inequality.

Taking up these considerations, the keynote presents selected results of a DFG-funded research project focusing on the process of career choice during the transition from school and examining the resulting path dependencies with regard to the transitions into training and their further progression. The research questions that are addressed in this talk are: How do young people adapt their career aspirations to the expectations of their environment and the realities of the training market before they finish school? Which consequences does this process of compromise formation have for their further education and training? How do social inequalities in terms of social origin, migration background and gender structure this process? To answer these questions, longitudinal data of the Starting Cohort 4 of the National Education Panel (NEPS) were used to examine the careers of ninth-grade students. These data were enriched with structural information on occupations from official statistical data. This allowed us to examine which occupational fields young people prefer, in which dimensions, such as income or job security, they make compromises, how well their desired occupation matches their realized training occupation, and which consequences these parameters have for the further course of training.