Exploring the Nexus Education-Work in Youth Transitions to Adulthood: How Education, Merit, Luck and Precarious Work Shape the Trajectories of Young Adults

Studies in the fields of sociology of education and youth research have focused on the way that transitions from education to employment shape youth lives and produce unequal outcomes for different social groups. In the last decade, researchers have turned their attention to the spread of precarious employment within youth labour markets. Some researchers have placed the lens on the robustness of the education-job nexus; others have developed definitions of what precarious work means and entails; whereas others have engaged in debates about the translation of precarious work into precarious lives. In this paper, I focus on expanding the boundaries of these sociological agendas by examining the strength of the contemporary education-job nexus, what precarious work does to young people, and how insecurity at work shapes different spheres of youth lives. To illustrate these conceptual inquiries, I draw on longitudinal data from a mixed-methods project tracking the transition to adulthood of young Australians since 2005. I examine more than 2,000 open-text comments from annual surveys from 2016 (participants aged 27) to 2024 (participants aged 35). The longitudinal analysis, firstly, reveals that young adults invest in education well into their late twenties and beyond. However, despite this investment, job security in the labour market is not always link with ideas of merit, educational investment, or “hard-work” but often attributed to “luck” or being “fortunate”. Secondly, the data shows that for young adults’ job insecurity has a negative impact on other spheres of life, such as health, relationships, wellbeing and future-planning. Finally, an environment of labour precarity can affect the employment trajectory and planning of young adults regardless if they are in secure and insecure work.