Transferring graduate knowledge to the family farm

摘要

All new graduates from higher education face a bridging process into fulltime professional employment. There are rules of workplace etiquette to understand, organisational politics to negotiate, and there is the transfer of theoretical knowledge to practical processes and strategic decision-making. It is the process of transfer of knowledge so that it is effectively used in the workplace, along with sound judgements and decisions that make for an experienced and valuable worker. Dr Simon Livingstone,Principal of Marcus Oldham College in Geelong, recently told students: "Graduates of agriculture courses who are returning to the family farm form a group of people who have a range of quite unique circumstances, barriers and opportunities. Their uniquecircumstances derive from the fact that they are returning to the same workplace they usually grew up in, but in a different role and with a different set of expectations on them. Growing up with the family on the farm means they left for higher education study with an already well developed store of tacit knowledge and their course would, at least to some extent, have been putting some theory around already formed practices."