Over the last twenty years, Marloes has studied various topics in labour economics from different angles. She did not followed a standard academic career path. Instead she has been involved in policy analysis, first as a contract researcher at SEO Economics, simultaneously as PhD-student at Tinbergen Institute, subsequently as post doc researcher at the Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS), then as program manager Labour Economics at CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis and currently as researcher/policy advisor at the Dutch public employment and social security office UWV. In all these positions, she has pursued high quality standards in her research and policy advise, as a result of which she has been able to publish some of her work in international academic journals. Policy relevance has been key in all of her research and many of her projects have had an impact on Dutch labour market policies, e.g. on the issue of flexible employment relations and the lower end of the labour market. Since she values the distribution of research to a broad public, she also worked as an editor of the Dutch economic journal TPEdigitaal and of the website Flex Work Research Monitor.

Marloes de Graaf-Zijl joined IZA as a Research Fellow in May 2018.