Agricultural Workforce Transformation in Indonesia: Emerging Competency Requirements for Sustainable and Smart Agriculture

Abstract

Indonesia’s agricultural workforce faces intersecting demographic, technological, and sustainability transitions, but their implications for competency development remain dispersed across disciplines. This scoping review maps Indonesian evidence published between 2016 and 2026, using a documented Scopus search complemented by semantic literature discovery using Elicit and reporting study selection with PRISMA-ScR. Forty-six studies were included in descriptive evidence mapping and thematic synthesis, with VOSviewer term co-occurrence analysis as a supplementary descriptive tool. The literature describes ageing, limited youth entry, labour reallocation, mechanisation, and digitalisation. In combination, these trends point to six interconnected competency domains: technical-production, digital-technological, managerial-entrepreneurial, social-communication, adaptive-problem-solving, and environmental or green capabilities. Readiness to apply them also depends on education, extension, infrastructure, finance, farmer organisations, and policy support. The integrated framework proposed here organises these relationships but has not been independently validated. The review is limited by heterogeneity among included designs, incomplete provenance of some screening and network-analysis details, and the predominantly descriptive nature of the evidence. Integrated competency development and enabling institutions are therefore plausible priorities for further research and context-specific workforce policy.