(Press-News.org) How long have you been doing your current job? Have you ever thought about trying a new profession? How difficult does change seem to you? The current rapid transformation of the labor market is putting many workers to the test: they struggle to keep up and move into new roles, while at the same time companies are having difficulty finding qualified personnel. A new study has analyzed the French labor market using methods from statistical physics, and found that over 90% of jobs today function as bottlenecks: they are easily accessible, but once entered, they become traps from which it is hard to move elsewhere—even when other opportunities are available.
The study, conducted by Max Knicker, Karl Naumann-Woleske, and Michael Benzaquen of École Polytechnique in Paris, and published in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment (JSTAT), provides a detailed mapping of accessibility and transferability characteristics within the French occupational network. It reveals strong structural rigidity in the overall labor system and offers a basis for understanding what kinds of interventions and policy decisions might help to break this deadlock.
Technology, lifestyle changes, migration, and other issues are rapidly transforming the labor market: professions that were in high demand just ten years ago may now be obsolete, while new and growing jobs struggle to find skilled workers. This affects people’s lives directly, and also impacts economic development. To find effective strategies, it is crucial to understand the detailed mechanisms of access and transition between occupations. Doing so requires the analysis of large-scale data, which is where statistical physics, developed precisely to manage large volumes of dynamic information, becomes particularly useful. Knicker and his team applied network analysis tools to data from the last ten years of the French labor market, revealing structural rigidities and vulnerabilities.
One of the study’s strengths is its ability to view the system in its entirety. The researchers did not rely on a sample or projections, but on real, comprehensive data from across France. “We used official data provided by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies through the service of Secure Data Access Center (CASD). In total, we had access to information on about 30 million workers and employers in France, whom we tracked over a 10-year period,” explains Max Knicker, a PhD candidate at the École Polytechnique in Paris, affiliated with the EconophysiX lab and lead author of the study. The team worked with high-resolution administrative data from INSEE (the French National Institute of Statistics), specifically the BTS-Postes (Base Tous Salariés – Postes).
“We then assigned each occupation a score for two key metrics: transferability and accessibility,” Knicker explains.“On one hand, Transferability captures how diverse the set of occupations is that people move into from a given occupation. Accessibility, on the other hand, measures how diverse the origins are of people entering a given occupation, indicating how broadly accessible it is from across the labor market.”
Knicker and colleagues mapped all occupations onto a two-dimensional space defined by these variables, identifying four main clusters or categories of jobs. “Diffuser occupations are those with high transferability but low accessibility, they’re harder to enter but offer a wide range of exit opportunities,” Knicker explains. “Channel occupations are both hard to enter and offer few onward transitions. Hubs are both widely accessible and highly transferable, acting as central nodes in the transition network. Finally, the most common type are condensers — occupations that many workers can enter from diverse backgrounds, but which offer limited options for moving onward.”
Hubs, condensers, diffusers, and channels
“Hubs include jobs like retail sellers, which require a broad but not highly specialized skill set,” says Knicker. “Condensers include caregiving roles: technically, there aren’t many barriers to entry, but once someone enters a condenser occupation it’s hard to transition to something else. As for diffusers—where few occupations enter but from which it’s easy to move elsewhere—we’re talking about roles like technical flight managers or merchant navy specialists: jobs that require specific training to enter, but that training enables transitions to many other areas.”
“Lastly,” Knicker concludes, “channels are jobs that are hard to access and hard to leave. They often involve highly specialized skills, such as industrial welding machine operators.”
“For now, it’s a descriptive analysis. We’re essentially looking at the past, not building predictive models yet. But even this descriptive framework helps us understand how transitions happen,” Knicker explains. “While the broader labor market is undoubtedly undergoing structural shifts due to technological and economic change, we found that the observed occupational transition patterns have remained relatively stable over the past decade. This empirical stability allows us to use the current structure as a meaningful baseline, enabling our metrics to highlight occupations where policy efforts might most effectively ease reallocation bottlenecks.”
According to Knicker, the insights from this and future studies could help guide efforts to promote smoother transitions within the labor market. “With our work, we aim to identify the occupations with the greatest potential to act as levers or bridges, facilitating people’s movement from one job to another.”
Knicker and his team are making their methodology available to anyone who wants to apply it to other contexts—for example, to other European countries or even across the entire EU. One current challenge, however, he explains, is data standardization: some countries have extensive datasets comparable to France’s, while in others the picture is more fragmented. Still, the study just published is only a first step. In the future, Knicker and colleagues hope to track individual career trajectories and integrate other types of data, such as information on specific vocational training.
END
Few diffusers and many bottlenecks: the French labor market according to statistical physics
Why changing careers is so hard: physicists uncover hidden rigidity in the job market - new paper in JSTAT
2025-05-27
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
Integrating pharmacogenomic guided prescribing into routine clinical practice – promising results from the NHS PROGRESS study
2025-05-26
Milan, Italy: Pharmacogenomics studies how individuals respond to drugs based on their genetic code. Using that knowledge to guide prescribing in routine care could lead to better outcomes for patients and save money for health systems.
Generating pharmacogenomic data in the laboratory is relatively straightforward, but a major challenge is making that information available to frontline healthcare professionals in a clinically relevant format and timeframe. This has meant that, to date, only a limited numbers of patients have been able to benefit from such individually optimised treatments.
Dr John McDermott, ...
HHS panel recommend statins for adults with HIV at risk for cardiovascular disease
2025-05-26
Embargoed for release until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday 26 May 2025
Follow @Annalsofim on X, Facebook, Instagram, threads, and Linkedin
Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing ...
What birds can teach us about social learning
2025-05-26
How does a bird learn its birdsong? Tomoko Fujii and Masashi Tanaka, from Waseda University, explored what drives a zebra finch to approach and imitate other zebra finches to learn its birdsong in a new JNeurosci paper.
The researchers explored song learning in young male zebra finches as they interacted with “tutor” adults that already knew their birdsongs. Young zebra finches preferably approached tutors that sang longer but less frequently. Fujii and Tanaka next probed the role of a brain region traditionally linked to emotions in mammals (the amygdala) in this song-learning process. To examine the ...
Relationship between mutation profile detected by next-generation sequencing and histopathological parameters in lung squamous cell carcinoma
2025-05-26
Background and objectives
Lung Squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) represents the second most common non-small cell lung cancer. Although studies identified adenocarcinoma-like driver mutations in LSCC using next-generation sequencing (NGS), the disease is challenging to treat due to the limited number of detectable mutations for targeted drug therapy. This study aimed to evaluate the mutation profiles of LSCC detected by NGS to assess the relationships between different driver mutations and clinicopathological parameters.
Methods
NGS ...
Megalodon: The broad diet of the megatooth shark
2025-05-26
FRANKFURT. Otodus megalodon was the largest predatory fish in Earth’s history: Measuring up to 24 meters, it was longer than a truck with a trailer and weighed almost twice as much. Embedded in its jaws were triangular teeth the size of a hand, and its bite had the force of an industrial hydraulic press. It swam through the world’s oceans between 20 and 3 million years ago, frequently on the hunt for prey to satisfy a calorie demand as vast as its size: According to estimates, it required around 100,000 kilocalories per day. Science widely assumed that megalodon’s main calorie intake was in the form of ...
Climate change driving sexual and reproductive health risks among young adolescents in Kenya
2025-05-26
Toronto, ON – Climate change and extreme weather events are threatening the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of young adolescents in Kenya, according to a new study published earlier this month in BMJ Global Health. The study reveals that food, water, and sanitation insecurities are placing young adolescents aged 10-14, especially girls, at increased risk of school dropout, transactional sex, gender-based violence, and early pregnancy.
“Climate change isn’t just an environmental issue, it’s an urgent public health ...
No sex differences in autistic toddlers at time of first diagnosis, study finds
2025-05-26
Males are more than four times more likely to receive an autism diagnosis than females. But a new study by researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine has found no clinical differences in autistic traits between the sexes in toddlers when they are first diagnosed with autism. The study was published in Nature Human Behavior on May 26, 2025. The findings have potential implications for early diagnosis and intervention for autistic children.
Between 2002 and 2022, the researchers assessed more than 2,500 male and female toddlers between 12 and 48 months of age. Of these toddlers, 1,500 were ...
Enhance agricultural water management in the African Union
2025-05-26
Africa's predominantly rainfed agricultural sector is highly vulnerable to erratic rainfall and the impacts of climate change. Despite having significant irrigation potential, only a small fraction of Africa’s arable land is currently equipped for irrigation. A new policy brief by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) - Implementing the IDAWM Framework to Enhance Agricultural Water Management in the African Union – developed in collaboration with Centre on Climate Change & Planetary Health of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, International ...
New guideline focused on managing hypertension in primary care
2025-05-26
A new guideline to diagnose and treat hypertension is aimed at helping primary care clinicians, including family physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, and pharmacists, manage the disease. The new guideline, the first of 2 from Hypertension Canada, is published in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.241770, and will be republished with permission in Canadian Family Physician and Canadian Pharmacists Journal, with a summary in Canadian Nurse.
Hypertension is the most common modifiable risk factor for heart disease and death, affecting about 1 in 4 adults in Canada. Canada has been a ...
New blood test enables the rapid diagnosis of thousands of rare genetic diseases
2025-05-25
Milan, Italy: A new, rapid testing method will greatly help the diagnosis of rare diseases in babies and children, according to research to be presented to the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today (Monday). While rare genetic diseases are uncommon, as their name suggests, there are more than 7,000 types of disease caused by mutations in more than 5,000 known genes, affecting approximately 300 million individuals worldwide. Currently about half of all patients with a suspected rare disease remain undiagnosed and existing testing methods for undiagnosed conditions are typically slow, ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
Professional responsibility for COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy
Landmark study uncovers role of tumor microenvironment in nasopharyngeal carcinoma progression which supports personalized treatment
Control of spin qubits at near absolute zero a game changer for quantum computers
Immune cells promoting tumor growth? How dying cancer cells turn their enemies into allies
How diverse brain cells reach a decision together
Pervasive surveillance of people is being used to access, monetize, coerce, and control
New global index aims to help people and nature thrive together
Increased prescribing of ADHD medication and real-world outcomes over time
New study shows how biomass changed over 500 million years
Estimated 2023-2024 COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in adults
City of Hope’s Dr. Yuman Fong delivers Lister Legacy Lecture, spotlighting surgical cancer innovations
Creation of new molecule could help develop stamp-sized hard drives capable of storing 100 times more data than current tech
COVID vaccine reduces severity of illness, death for adults, especially among at-risk populations
Can targeted payment adjustments help solve the infectious disease physician shortage?
Scientists discover unknown organelle inside our cells
Gone with the glaciers: Researchers track unprecedented ice loss
Even in athletes, obese BMI associated with worse concussion recovery
ESMO Gastrointestinal Cancers Congress 2025: Event announcement
The Drug Target Discovery Institute of Korea University successfully held opening symposium
UNM astronomers confirm new gas giant exoplanet with help from citizen scientists worldwide
Electrochemical catheter hub could prevent bloodstream infections
Spotting bad batteries before they malfunction
Grip strength gives researchers a new handle on psychosis
Metals found in disposable e-cigarette vapor could pose health risks
Disposable e-cigarettes more toxic than traditional cigarettes
Technical refinement in airway surgery: Wrapping tracheobronchial anastomoses
Understanding how a key protein helps aggressive blood cancer grow, paving the way for targeted therapies
Uncovering the role of vitamin C in skin regeneration
Advancing regenerative agriculture: TUdi unveils new digital tools for soil health monitoring
More staff addressing mental health in schools buffers toll of growing up in disadvantaged communities
[Press-News.org] Few diffusers and many bottlenecks: the French labor market according to statistical physicsWhy changing careers is so hard: physicists uncover hidden rigidity in the job market - new paper in JSTAT