Employer-Sponsored Training and Longer-Tenured Workers: Evidence from Australia

I estimate the incidence and intensity of training with particular emphasis on where along the tenure-training profile formal training occurs. Using data from the Survey of Education and Training gathered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, I find a different relationship between training and tenure than what is suggested by human capital models. Instead of training being concentrated towards the beginning of the employment relationship, it tends to be evenly distributed along the tenure profile. Such findings are more consistent with theories of wage compression and strategic complementarity than traditional human capital approaches.