Gatekeeping careers Hiring evaluations of skills and education across contexts

Hiring agents gatekeep careers by granting access to positions and by judging which career paths are valuable. Whereas the importance of education and skills seems evident, common assumptions about their link with careers remain untested. Combining stratification research and the sociology of (e)valuation, this dissertation examines employers’ evaluations of skills and education over careers in Software Development and Human Resource Management in Germany and England, based on qualitative interviews and a factorial survey experiment. The findings offer insights into how skill evaluations work across contexts, how skills are constructed in relation to careers and class signals, into how hiring agents value different characteristics of education and reject its worth as a hiring criterion.