Is there a flight from welfare professions?

In the public policy debate, there has been a concern that personnel are fleeing welfare professions, such as the police and teachers. However, there does not seem to exist any systematic quantitative analysis of this phenomenon. In this project, we investigate to what extent this has happened over time. We focus on four welfare professions with a clear link between education and occupation: police, teachers, pre-school teachers and nurses. The aim is to quantify the labour supply reserve in these professions and describe the flows into and out of the professions over time. We ask three questions:

1. What education do the employees within the profession have?

2. Among those with a specific education, what fraction is employed in the intended occupation?

3. What have the flows into and out of the profession looked like over time? 

We study the period 1985–2016. We also intend to study these patterns over the age distribution, across gender, for immigrants and across different Swedish regions.