This variable reflects the total length of full-time employment in the respondent's career up to the point of the interview in a given year. The variable is created by combining monthly information on employment status from the calendar dataset artkalen.dta, which provides monthly information on activity status since an individual entered the SOEP, and annual information from the biographical dataset pbiospe.dta, which provides information on activity status over the individual's life course. PGEXPFT is generated by adding up the years of full-time employment before a respondent's first interview (from pbiospe.dta) plus months of full-time employment after their first interview (from artkalen.dta). If there is no monthly calendar data available in a given year of a respondent's career, the annual data from pbiospe.dta is used for that year. For annual data, if the year in which a spell started and ended is the same, a spell of 0.5 years is assumed.

Individuals without annual data (not contained in pbiospe.dta) are only assigned a non-missing value for this variable if they joined SOEP by the age of 18 and if there is calendar data on them in artkalen.dta. Respondents whose life course has been observed completely but with no spell of full-time employment are assigned the code [0]. The code [-1] “No answer” is assigned to all people whose life course has not been observed completely. People with inconsistent information receive [-3] “Not valid”.

From the 2021 wave onwards a new spell-type has been introduced in artkalen.dta, indicating the periods during which a respondent was in short-time employment (Kurzarbeit). As these spells do not specify the type of working contract (full-time/part-time) the respondent had during that time, but this time formally still counts as work experience, past and future information was used.

There can also be temporal overlaps between regular employment and short-time employment spells. In a first step, all overlapping months were deducted so that no month was counted twice.

In a second step, each short-time spell was assigned to either full-time or part-time employment experience. The following rules were applied: - If there was no overlap, the status from the previous employment was carried forward. - If there was an overlap with either the previous or the subsequent regular employment, the status of the overlapped spell was used - If there was an overlap with both the the previous and the subsequent employment spell, the status from the previous employment was used. - If there is no previous employment spell, the status of the subsequent employment is used - If the respondent never had any employment apart from the short-time spell, it is counted as full-time experience

Short-time spells were already once introduced in the years 1991 to 1995. Back then, all short-time spells were counted as full-time experience. For consistency reasons this was kept this way for these years in all waves.

PGEXPFT gives the length of full-time employment in years with months in decimal form. This means that a person with 2 years and 6 months of full-time experience, has a PGEXPFT value of 2.5 years. Please also see pgexppt (total length of part-time employment) and pgexpue (total length of unemployment).