Assessment of the needs of university-educated manpower in the fields of mechanization and agricultural machinery

One of the most critical concerns of planners is coordination and compatibility between the educational system's outputs and the labor market's needs. Higher education's quantitative and qualitative development should follow the predetermined goals to benefit as much as possible from graduates' abilities. Educational planning should provide the specialized needs of the labor market as well as prevent unemployment and waste of graduate abilities. Compatibility between job needs and quantitative and qualitative development of higher education plays a key role in getting stable jobs by agricultural graduates.Therefore, universities and agricultural higher education centers should implement educational programs in accordance with the changes, transformations, and challenges in the agricultural sector. In this article, the estimation of educated manpower needed in the fields of mechanization and agricultural machinery with a qualitative and narrative type of view and with an analytical method was discussed. This research is applied in terms of scope and descriptive study regarding the execution method. The estimation of the required manpower in the mentioned disciplines using the ratio density model by developing a focus group consisting of 10 agricultural education experts. The focus group included participants with common traits/experiences from the universities of Tehran, Azad Islamic Tehran Science and Research Unit, Agricultural Mechanization Development Center, Agricultural Engineering Technical Research Institute, Agricultural Engineering and Natural Resources Organization, and Agricultural and Industrial Machinery Union.