How do individual competencies impact on the employment careers of people living in Germany? How are person abilities interrelated with occupational mobility? How are competencies distributed between individual families and between partners? And what does this mean for chances of upward mobility in our society?

These and similar questions are examined by the nationwide long-term study PIAAC-L (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies), for which funding worth over €5.7 million has now been approved by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF). PIAAC-L is continuing the work of PIAAC in the German context. PIAAC—a study by the OECD and also known as the PISA study for adults—analyzes everyday skills and abilities of adults by international comparison.

The study is carried out by researchers from the Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories LIfBi, and the German Socio-Economic Panel SOEP situated at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). About 5,000 people in Germany aged between 18 and 67 years who have participated in PIAAC before, as well as their families, are surveyed by PIAAC-L. Overall, the survey will take place on three occasions from 2014 through 2017.