Determinants of employees' participation in adult education and training in China: A multilevel study

In the context of global market and knowledge economy development, adult education and training are regarded as an important factor in keeping economic growth in China. They also become a means for individuals to acquire knowledge, skills and to enhance human capital, thus improving their ability in the job market.; In the fast-growing market-oriented economy in China, many employees have been involved in job-related education and training of various kinds. In the transition from the planned to a market economy, firms are more autonomous in the organization of production, and individuals are free to pursue their occupational aspirations. Firms and individual started to take responsibilities to invest in education and training in order to acquire competence. It is interesting to study who participate in adult education and training as an opportunity to update job skills. It is important to understand if that would have implications in improving the workforce quality.; This thesis takes employees' participation in education and training for a study. It is focused on the following research questions: Who had an opportunity to participate in adult education and training during the economic reform in mainland China? What are the factors affecting employees' participation? Based on human capital theory, labor market segmentation theory and organization theory, it is hypothesized that employees' individual characteristics, the firms' internal structural characteristics, and the firms' characteristics in relations to labor market all these multi-level factors have impact on employees' participation in adult education and training. Independent variables are accordingly deduced into three groups. Individual characteristics are those achieved status possessed by employees before entering into the labor market, include age, gender, marital status, initial education level. Characteristics of the firms' internal labor market is represented by the employees' job related characteristics in terms of job position, work experience in years, mobility, and the extent an employee experienced the firms' reform. An employee acquired these work-related attributes after having entered the firm, or being selected by a firm if one's individual characteristics were considered matching in the workplace. Finally, firms' characteristics, reflecting firms' attributes as compared to other firms in the market system, would affect resource allocation and labor requirements. These variables include firm size, the average education year of employee with in firm, the overall mobility of a firm's internal labor market, types of ownership, and the economic industrial sector that the firm belongs to.; Cases of this study include 31736 employees from 410 enterprises, randomly sampled at China's county level from different regions in terms of economical development. Multilevel logistic regression was employed to model the impact of region, firm and individual characteristic on employees' participation in adult education and training. Dependent variables are classified in three groups in this study: (a) those employees who participated in the training provided by firm only, (b) those employees who participated in self-chosen and self-paid adult education and training outside firm only, and (c) those employees who participated in both two kinds of adult education and training.; The empirical analyses supported the hypothesis that employees' participation in adult education and training is determined by both individual characteristics and multi-level labor market structures. Both employees and their firms are embedded in certain social structure that could be facilitating or constraining in terms of making educational opportunities available to firms and individual employees. The findings clearly show that patterns of the three groups of independent variables having impact on the three types of participation choices vary.; In regard to employees' participation in firm prov...