Orientation Training and Job Satisfaction: A Sector and Gender Analysis

Abstract

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we investigate how various types of job training impact upon employees’ job satisfaction and its domains. We find that orientation training exerts a significant positive effect on newcomer male employees’ job satisfaction in both the private and public sectors, but it increases the job satisfaction of newcomer female employees only in the public sector. Other types of job training have only a weak effect on job satisfaction. We attribute the predominance of orientation training as a strong predictor of job satisfaction to its important function of facilitating the workplace socialization of new employees by reducing the uncertainty about aspects of the job that are not always easily contractible.

Keywords: job training, orientation training, job satisfaction, organizational socialization