Iran’s futures study of agricultural jobs for the horizon 2025

The nature of future jobs will be different from what we have today, due to trends and changes in the society. Therefore, one cannot expect trained human resources in past jobs to have the potential to play a role in new and emerging jobs in the future. Meanwhile, as one of the sectors with high employment potential, the agricultural sector will also see job changes under the influence of transformative trends. Therefore, the present research seeks to conduct a future study of agricultural jobs. For this purpose, the qualitative approach of environmental scanning has been used as a method. In this process, apart from reviewing documents and reports, 13 experts selected by snowball sampling from different fields of agriculture familiar with training and development of agricultural jobs were also interviewed. The value of the agreement coefficient between the evaluators (Cohen’s Kappa) was sufficient. Overall, the results indicate that on the one hand, trends such as reducing economic potential and shrinking agricultural land and consequently increasing the risk of agricultural activities have had negative impacts on employment. On the other hand, trends of increasing population and the necessity of agricultural products for society are factors with significant potential to curb the decline in demand for agricultural jobs. The outcome of these factors will eventually lead to the emergence of jobs based on higher-profit, knowledge-based products, and focus on waste reduction or business recovery.