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This article addresses young people’s school-to-work transitions.The analysis draws on data from a Swedish ongoing qualitativelongitudinal project spanning over 10 years. In this article, wefocus on eight young people who grew up and still live in a smallrural inland town in North Sweden where the regional labormarket is going through a process of rapid reindustrializationafter decades of industrial decline and welfare stateretrenchment. The aim of the study is to explore the young rural‘stayers’ transitions in a region characterized by strong economicgrowth, yet with long-standing challenges in terms of socialreproduction, focusing on what kind of work they end up withand their speed of establishment on the labor market. At thetime of the latest interview all but one of the 8 participants inthis study had employment in local or regional industries,however, how fast they had managed to establish themselves onthe labor market varied between them. Further, their staying onlocally depended largely on regional mobility. We discuss theirtransitions in relation to the ongoing re-industrialization processin North Sweden but also what implications young stayers’school-to-work transitions might have in relation to the widersocial reproduction in the region.

The article addresses school-to-work transitions among young women in a strongly male dominated professional sphere – the transport industry. Drawing on interviews with two girls over the time span 2015–2022 and visits to their upper secondary school 2016–2019, the study focuses on how power structures related to gender play out in the positioning that takes place in school and workplaces: How the girls were positioned socially and in relation to professional qualification, and how they positioned themselves in these respects. The findings indicate significant changes in discourse and practice when the girls transitioned from students to employees, changes which in the article are discussed in the framework of ‘inequality regimes’ and through the lens of the ‘glass funnel’ metaphor. Linking the funnel metaphor to the framework of inequality regimes broadens the picture to consider how young people are exposed to generally increasing inequalities in labour markets where institutions and organisations are affected by neoliberal economic policies, weakened collective protection of workers and wider wage gaps. With individualisation and insecurity, young people like the two girls in focus in this article, are increasingly left to fend for themselves in a harsh labour market.