Abstract

Leaving academia as a working environment and following employment in industry is a specific type of career transition. Moreover, consecutive employment in a large firm or a small and medium-sized enterprise constitutes different career paths due to the difference in their organizational structures and roles. Therefore, this article aims to shed light on factors driving academics to take up employment in large firms or small and medium-sized enterprises. A special emphasis is laid on their embeddedness within a social network and used as an additional explanatory factor in this analysis. By using linked employer-employee data the individuals and their consecutive employment are traced and logit regression is used to identify relevant factors driving employment in small and large firms. Surprisingly, the results indicate that high-skilled individuals from other universities play a role for employment in small firms, whereas peers from the same university are linked to employment in large firms.