Assessing the contribution of the Agricultural Economics profession in addressing graduate unemployment

Tertiary education is servicing a rapidly changing labour market which is driven by the digital revolution whilst subjected to unprecedented events. The Covid-19 pandemic led to the increased deployment of the fourth industrial revolution innovations in workplaces which further threatens the employability of graduates. The extent to which agri-food professions like agricultural economics were affected before the pandemic by fourth industrial revolution concepts as big data and automation is not yet ascertained. More so, their familiarity with common examples of the fourth industrial revolution and their propensity to adopt new technologies begotten by the fourth industrial revolution innovations. This study, therefore, provided some insight into the impacts of big data and automation by capturing the perceptions of agricultural economics graduates of the University of Pretoria before the Covid-19 pandemic. The distribution of the familiarity scores were more skewed to the less familiar suggesting that the graduates are not adept at using new digital technologies. The results indicated that their propensity to adopt new digital technologies could not be influenced by academic performance or the experience the graduate has. However, the graduates believe that big data application and automation will be prevalent in their current jobs over the 10 years. They perceived employment creation, job losses, shifts in skillset demanded on the labour market as a result of automation and big data application. Thereby posing a need for universities as suppliers of the labour market to prepare their graduates for the changes that are brought by the fourth industrial revolution so as to increase their resilience in food security in the event of crises.