Labour mobility aligns unevenly with occupational skill similarity across social groups and local labour markets

Understanding whether transitioning between occupations is constrained by workers’ skills or by social stratification remains an unresolved challenge across economics, sociology and human geography. Existing approaches offer only partial solutions. In this paper we overcome this limitation by introducing a network-based framework that independently measures occupational skill similarity and compares it directly with realised labour mobility. This allows us to quantify how closely the two align across social groups and local labour markets. Combining rich administrative and job advertisement data from Sweden, we map skill demands into a network where nodes represent occupations and links measure the overlap in skills demanded. We trace realised labour mobility along these pathways. With this analytical framework, we show that labour mobility strongly follows skill-related pathways. However, access to these pathways is uneven: occupational segregation along gender, education and country of birth shapes labour mobility beyond skill relatedness. For gender and education, occupational segregation affects mobility most where skills overlap the least. Crucially, local labour markets where labour mobility aligns more closely with skill similarity exhibit higher incomes, greater occupational diversity, faster re-employment, reduced risk of worker out- migration and smaller gender wage gaps. These findings suggest that labour-market adaptation depends not only on whether workers possess transferable skills, but also on whether social and regional contexts enable those skills to be redeployed. Our framework provides a common empirical basis for understanding how skill similarity, social stratification and local labour-market structure jointly shape labour-market adaptation.