Green Talent Development for Sustainable Agriculture and Forestry: Practical Education, Performance Appraisal, and Business Innovation
Main article
Abstract
Green talent development has become a central institutional priority for higher education systems that train graduates for the agricultural and forestry sectors, yet the performance-appraisal architecture that links practical education to business-innovation outcomes remains weakly specified. This study develops a four-dimensional performance-appraisal framework for practical education in agriculture and forestry programmes and applies it to a sample of 359 stakeholders (312 students and 47 faculty) drawn from three regional universities in Poland during the 2023–2024 academic year, supplemented by depth interviews with sixteen industry employers. The framework decomposes the appraisal goal into four primary dimensions—practical education system, education process, instructor capability, and learning environment—and sixteen sub-indicators weighted through an analytic hierarchy process. We combine survey responses with factor analysis and importance–performance gap analysis to identify the appraisal sub-indicators that most strongly constrain green talent readiness. Results indicate that the practical education process dimension carries the largest aggregate weight (0.308), that innovation capability and practice-base construction display the widest importance–performance gaps, and that triangulated student–faculty–employer evidence supports five mutually reinforcing optimisation paths: index-system reform, multi-stakeholder co-evaluation, industry–university co-supervision, digital appraisal platforms, and continuous incentive feedback. The study contributes a transferable measurement framework for green-talent appraisal in regulated education sectors and a set of design heuristics for embedding business-innovation outcomes in sustainability-oriented curricula.
