Questions about respondents’ employment underwent substantial changes from Wave 14 of the Innovation Panel and Wave 13 of the Main survey, to better reflect how people now work in the UK. For Waves 1 to 13, questions focused on one main job and one (if any) secondary job. Since Wave 14 of the Innovation Panel (and Wave 13 of the Main survey), respondents have been able to report details about multiple jobs (initially up to 16 jobs, subsequently reduced to up to 10 jobs). These changes and the resultant variables are described in full in the Main Survey User Guide.
From Wave 17 of the Innovation Panel, there has been a further change to the data format for releasing these variables, although the underlying questions and resultant data have not changed. When the questions were amended at Wave 14 of the Innovation Panel to allow reporting of multiple additional jobs, the resulting variables were initially released as extra columns within the indresp file. For most respondents, these columns were empty for all jobs except the first job. To reduce the number of nearly empty columns in the main file, while still making the same data available to data users, from Wave 17 the variables related to second and subsequent jobs have been moved to a separate employment file.
Moving the variables to a separate file has also enabled them to be presented in ‘long’ rather than ‘wide’ format. Users of the employment file will find each row represents a certain job for a certain person. For example, a person reporting 4 jobs will have 4 rows in the employment file, with each of those rows containing variables about one of their jobs numbered 1 to 4; the variables related to job 1 will still be reported in the indresp file.
