Recent research has shown that skills, which constitute an important part of
human capital, are more portable across occupations than previously thought.
What has not gained enough insight so far is that there are non-negligible
asymmetries in the transferability of human capital when comparing a job move
from occupation i to j to a job move from j to i. Although the skills that two
occupations use may be similar, asymmetries arise from the differences in the
complexity of those two occupations. For instance, if an engineer is forced to
work as a technician, little additional learning will have to take place, but
much previously acquired human capital will remain idle. The opposite is the
case of a technician who aspires an engineering position. We propose
quantifying such asymmetries by developing measures that capture human capital
redundancy, (i.e., the amount of human capital required in the old job that
remains idle in the new job) and human capital shortage (i.e., the amount of
human capital a person lacks for his new job), for occupational-switchers. We
find that, when individuals change jobs, they move to occupations where as
little as possible of the previously gained human capital remains idle. People
also seem to minimize the amount of skills that one will have to learn. Human
capital asymmetries also affect the wage offers at the new occupations. After
selection and endogeneity corrections, shortage of skills results in lower, and
excess of skills in higher wage offers. However, human capital shortages are
associated with a faster wage growth at the new job, suggesting that people
consciously choose more complex jobs to further their careers. The paper
further proposes measures of (useful and useless) skill experience and shows
that they contain information beyond the one captured by general labor market
experience and occupation-specific experience when explaining wage dynamics.