Removing Terminological Ambiguity from Agricultural Graduates' Employability – Oriented Skills

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.