Career and Education Strategies of Young Adults in Croatia: The Role of Capitals and Habitus in Transition to Employment

Stable employment has become hard to attain for many young people in contemporary Western societies as they cope with transitions to work marked by longer periods of job-seeking, unpaid internships and underemployment (Woodman & Wyn, 2015; ILO, 2014; Standing, 2011). As a country with one of the highest youth and young adult unemployment rates in the European Union (Eurostat, 2014), Croatia is no exception to those kind of labor market entry insecurities (Matković, 2011) young people have to navigate through.

Along with the influences from macro social factors, the transition from education to employment is an outcome of the young peoples’ long term education and career strategies as well as the specific strategies in the process of seeking employment. Following Bourdieu (1997) we take strategies as part conscious, part pre-conscious and generated from the habitus. And as the social world is ‘accumulated history’ (Bourdieu, 1979; 1990) and not everything is equally possible within, the young peoples’ strategies are not randomly distributed amongst the individuals.

In this paper we aim to explore the education and career strategies of young people in Croatia from different social backgrounds and how their habitus and unequal access to economic, social and cultural capital differentiate their transitions. To do so, we have reconstructed the field of social classes in Croatia with the Bourdieu-inspired Multiple Correspondence Analysis (Le Roux et al., 2008) using the data from a nationally representative survey. Typical households for every social fraction have been chosen and in-depth interviews with 20 young people who had finished education conducted, along with the separate interviews with their parents. That enables us to explore the role of social inequalities in the transitions from education to employment as well as the forming of the strategies as interplay of structure and agency, and family and young peoples’ habitus and capitals.