Comparative study of professional competencies of medicinal plants course graduates of Imam Khomeini Higher Education Center with the Work Market requirement

One of the reasons for the low efficiency of university graduates in the Work Market is to provide the theoretical training regardless of the Work Market requirement in the Higher Education. In order to solve this problem, the Applied Scientific University and following of that ‘the training centers of Jihad-e-keshavarzi were created with the aim of training qualified skills graduates who the Work Market require them .Therefore, the present research was conducted with the aim of comparative study of professional competencies of Applied Scientific graduates in medicinal plants course of Imam Khomeini Higher Education with the needs of Work Market in a consecutive mixed method in 2018 . To achieve the research goal, at first ,the Delphi method was used to extract Work Market competencies. The statistical community of this section included the activists of the Medicinal Plants Department and faculty members and instructors of Applied Scientific Higher Education Centers (n=27) who were selected through a targeted random sampling method. The statistical community of this stage of research included 380 Medicinal Plants graduates during 2009-2016 that 181 students of them were selected by random sampling based on Krejcie and Morgan table. The results showed that the level of competencies of the Work Market for graduates was lower than employers' expectations. It is suggested that, in order to aligning the graduates' competencies with the Work Market requirement and increasing their employment, when designing and compiling the courses of these centers, effective interaction with the employers, their expectations should be considered.