As mentioned in the methods section, the four cluster solution we have retained allows grouping internally homogeneous trajectories that, at the same time, have very different characteristics. This can be observed in Table 2, which presents a synopsis of the main characteristics of the four types of trajectories, including the most characteristic events of every type of trajectory, the kind of unemployment experienced in the trajectory (if any), and the socio-demographic characteristics of the individuals in each group.Footnote 11 We present them briefly in the following lines.

The first type, which we call the stable employment trajectory (44% of the cases in the sample) is characterised by job stability. Young people following this trajectory held stable employment for practically the entire time frame of our study. Therefore, the remaining employment situations have a negligible presence for those in this trajectory. Regarding their socio-demographic characteristics, young people with this trajectory are more likely to be older (30 to 34 years of age), have secondary or higher educational levels, be women, have been born in Spain, and be the children of individuals in scientific, intellectual or liberal professions.

The second type, which we call the precarious trajectory (26% of the cases) is characterised by unstable employment situations. Individuals with this trajectory experience long-term unemployment, which is combined with periods of inactivity and short odd jobs. In these cases, unemployment and temporality appear to be the common consequences of shared disadvantageous situations in the labour market, as suggested by Prieto and Pérez de Guzmán (2015). Young people with this type of trajectory are more likely to have low levels of education (at most having only finished compulsory education), to have been born outside of Spain, be under 30 years of age and be the children of low-skilled workers.

The third type, which we refer to as a temporary employment trajectory (20% of the cases) is mainly characterised by the prevalence of temporary employment. Individuals with this trajectory have suffered more unemployment than young people with a stable or non-salaried trajectory, although in contrast to the precarious trajectory, their unemployment is short-term, and not long-term. The majority of individuals with this type of trajectory are under 30 years of age and have parents in semi-skilled occupations and with middle levels of education (post-compulsory secondary studies).

The last type, which we refer to as a non-salaried employment trajectory (accounting for only a bit more than 10% of our sample), has as its defining characteristic that individuals were either self-employed or business owners for the majority of the time examined. Almost the totality of individuals in this group were never unemployed during the entire period of the crisis studied. Regarding their socio-demographic characteristics, individuals with this trajectory are more likely to be older (from 30 to 34 years of age), men, born in Spain, and children of managers and business owners.

Table 3 presents the coefficients from the two multinomial logistic regression models. The first includes only socio-demographic characteristics and the second adds the variables related to the trajectory prior to the recession (TPR). Comparing this second model with the first one, our initial finding is that, as expected, the explanatory power of the model increases when the three new variables related to the TPR of our sample of young people are incorporated. This can be seen in the higher R2 value of the second model. Nevertheless, even when introducing the TPR variables, most of the socio-demographic variables remain significant, particularly regarding the precarious and non-salaried trajectories. Only among the young people who experienced a trajectory of temporary employment does the introduction of TPR variables really introduce a relevant change in the significance of the socio-demographic variables. This suggests that socio-demographic characteristics might influence in a similar way the career path of young people with a precarious trajectory before and after the start of recession, and that the TPR has been more decisive in the likelihood of a young person having experienced a temporary employment trajectory during the crisis instead of the stable one.

The results of the multinomial logistic regressions also show that in comparison to the stable trajectory that we use as a reference, the precarious trajectory is positively associated with three socio-demographic features: being under 25 years of age, having been born outside of Spain, and having a low educational level (compulsory level as the highest). The second model shows that this trajectory is also related with having been employed before the crisis in, at most, semi-skilled work and having suffered unemployment and unstable employment prior to the crisis.

The non-salaried employment trajectory is positively associated with the two socio-demographic features of being a man and having parents that are business owners, managers or technical employees, and is negatively associated with being between 25 and 29 years of age. Model 2 reveals that this trajectory is also associated with not having suffered unemployment or unstable employment prior to the crisis. It should be pointed out that in model 1, this trajectory is associated with having a low level of education (compulsory or less), but a small change in its significance places this coefficient below the 95% confidence level in model 2.

Finally, in model 2, the temporary employment trajectory is associated with the socio-demographic characteristic of having a low educational level and with three specific pre-crisis experiences: having low-skilled work, having suffered unemployment or unstable employment, and having had little prior experience in the labour market. The introduction in model 2 of these three characteristics carries with it the disappearance of the associations that exists in model 1 between this trajectory and being under 30 years of age and being born outside of Spain. It can be deduced, then, that it is not these two socio-demographic attributes that define its differences with those that have experienced a stable trajectory during the crisis.

There are three main findings derived from these results. The first is that the existence of four major types of trajectories among young people confirms that the labour market for young people in Spain is characterised by an internal segmentation that goes beyond the stable and unstable divide—or primary and secondary segments. The first two trajectories, the stable and non-salaried employment trajectories, feature very low levels of unemployment and certain continuity in employment. In contrast, the other two trajectories, the temporary employment trajectory and the precarious trajectory, present much higher levels of unemployment and an important presence of instability. However, these two latter trajectories have important differences between them: individuals in the temporary employment trajectory faced primarily short-term unemployment, and those who followed a precarious trajectory faced long-term unemployment and greater discontinuity and instability in employment. The existence in Spain of different layers within the unstable (or secondary) segment has been revealed by previous research, both for the pre-crisis period (Alós 2008; Verd and López-Andreu 2012) and crisis period (Castelló et al. 2013; López-Andreu and Verd 2016). Our results confirm these previous findings from a perspective based on the analysis of employment trajectories, and show its link with the presence of very different forms of unemployment.

Our second finding points to the importance of the socio-demographic characteristics of young people in regard to the types of trajectories experienced during the crisis. Thus, being in the youngest cohort and being born outside of Spain makes it more likely to have had the precarious trajectory. Having a low educational level makes it more likely that a young person will have followed the two types of trajectories that are more unstable and where unemployment is more frequent. These results confirm the results of other cross-sectional analyses and show a pattern of continuity with the period prior to the crisis regarding the trajectories of low-educated workers, immigrants and young persons under 25 years of age (García-Pérez and Muñoz-Bullón 2011; Verd and López-Andreu 2012; Rocha 2012a, b; Alós 2015; Alós and Lope 2015). Moreover, these results reveal that the dynamics of an ethno-stratification of the labour market (Cachón 2009) and the family transmission of (dis)advantages (Serracant 2012; O’Reilly et al. 2015) have continued structuring young people’s labour market experiences during the crisis. However, our results also show the emergence of an intermediate segment placed between the stable and the most precarious one that has been also hit by unemployment, and with many socio-demographic characteristics that are not significantly different from those of young people with a stable trajectory. The analysis of the TPR (see below) in this kind of career path becomes critical to understand what could have caused their unemployment during the Great Recession. Regarding the trajectories that were not affected by unemployment, being a man, being between 25 and 29 years of age and having parents that are managers, business owners, middle management or technical employees correlates with having experienced the non-salaried trajectory. Thus, a young person’s family background seems to be connected to the type of trajectory developed during the crisis. López-Andreu and Verd (2016), using a different data set, also reached a similar conclusion. These authors point out that the role of family background seems to be more important during the recession period than in the past in terms of differentiating between trajectories of stability and temporary employment. Although the stable trajectory has been taken as reference, it is worth mentioning that this trajectory presents the most significant differences with the precarious trajectory, showing once again the association between socio-demographic characteristics (what we have called social factors) and the specific segment where the labour market trajectory unfolds.Footnote 12

The third finding is related to the connexion of TPR with the trajectories young people experienced during the crisis. Results show an association between having been employed in low-skilled and semi-skilled jobs before the crisis and the two trajectories most affected by unemployment and instability. Likewise, having suffered unemployment and unstable employment before the crisis is associated with experiencing the two types of trajectories most affected by unemployment and job instability during the crisis. Therefore, we can infer from our results that in a context of economic recession workers being in a situation of unstable and low-skilled employment were the first to be dismissed, who were also, possibly, those in the weakest positions inside firms (Hernanz 2003). These results suggest that lay-offs have not been carried out independently of the previous career path and therefore continuity in the possibilities of being trapped in situations of instability and unemployment over time (Bruno et al. 2012; Rocha 2012a) for certain groups of young workers in Spain. This tendency is particularly strong in Spain due to the low rates of transition from temporary to stable employment, and the high rates of transition between temporary employment and unemployment or inactivity (Belvis and Benach 2014).

However, the comments above should be qualified taking into account the negative correlation between years of employment experience and belonging to the temporary employment trajectory. The more experience in the labour market a young person has the less likely he or she is to fall into a temporary employment trajectory, and the more likely he or she is to have a more stable itinerary. This suggests that some young people that began working with temporary contracts moved on to situations of stable employment as they accumulated enough experience in the labour market before the start of the crisis, while those with less experience were more likely to lose their jobs. Thus, the argument that the institutional design of school-to-work transitions in Spain produced work experience gaps (Pastore 2015; Pastore and Giuliani 2015) that affected the likelihood of being laid off with the onset of the crisis is reinforced by our results. For the years prior to the crisis, Quintini et al. (2007, p. 8) found that accumulated years of work have great importance for an individual in finding their first stable position after entering the labour market. In Spain, the average time for doing so was six years for the period they examined in their study (from 1994 to 2000), which is the longest period among the western countries of the EU. However, employment experience did not protect young people from having a precarious trajectory, revealing very different employment prospects for this latter group. This suggests that the combination of factors related to previous employment experience and social factors (related to individuals’ social profile) define whether temporary contracts represent a way of accessing a more stable job or not. In other words, the most vulnerable profiles, which are placed in the most precarious segment of the labour market, have greater difficulty making their experience count.