Removing Terminological Ambiguity from Agricultural Graduates' Employability – Oriented Skills

Abstract

Abstract
Several terms have been applied for students' employability-oriented skills in higher
education including entrepreneurship, employability, generic skills, transferable skills, core
skills, key skills, enterprise skills and career development learning. Due to variety of terms
occasionally used carelessly or interchangeably, terminology can be one the challenges for
researchers and practitioners in higher education. Accordingly, this paper aimed to remove
ambiguity about these terms and determine their overlap and differences for quite understanding
and consequently proper application of them in research and practice in higher agricultural
education. Comparing entrepreneurship and employability reveled that pre-founding competencies
(mostly opportunity competency) is the characteristic of entrepreneurship and career development
learning is the characteristic of employability. Post-founding competencies (managerial competencies)
and technical (specialized skills) are among their similarity points. Core, key, generic, transferable,
enterprise skills and career development skills can be viewed as an aspect of employability. Core, key,
generic, transferable generally are used interchangeably, but some differences can be asserted. In this
regard, generic and transferable skills which are synonyms, encompassing a wider range of skills in
comparison to core, key and enterprise skills, indeed these skills are a particular type of generic or
transferable skills. Core and key skills are synonym, bearing in mind that key skills term was used
later, by Experts instead of core skills and since then became common.

Keywords

References

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