Un approccio longitudinale alla valutazione degli esiti occupazionali dei corsi di formazione professionale

The article shows how to apply the sociological approach of life courses to the evaluation research on the occupational outcomes of vocational training courses. In the first part we review the main principles of the life-courses approach. In the second section we describe the main features of the research Placement 2006 conducted by IReR (Regional Research Institute of the Lombardia); in particular, we focus on the research design and the procedures used to collect information. In the last part we present an empirical application of event history techniques. We use sequence analysis to examine occupational careers after the end of the vocational training courses and survival analysis to study the duration of unemployment episodes by gender and type of course. At the end, we briefly discuss the pro and cons of this approach and we suggest further development within this framework.