The beginning of a young advisor`s career is difficult. It is a beautiful but also demanding job to support entrepreneurs such as farmers to not only be economically successful but to also integrate environmental and welfare issues. While Universities can provide theoretical knowledge, this is still not enough for young advisors to thrive in this attractive but challenging profession at the beginning of their careers. Many young advisors leave their positions within the first year. The results are the following: high costs, high turnover rates, and waste of resources. Moreover, advisory services are experiencing a crisis where the over-aging of advisors has exposed them to the risk of losing their know-how, which is mainly intangible knowledge, within the human beings themselves, based on long years of experience. Often there is no institutionalized framework or routine knowledge management to hand over these competencies in a structured way to the next generation of advisors. The Young EUFRAS mentoring and training program will bridge this hand-over gap that exists within the advisory services by pairing experienced advisors with young advisors.

Young advisors are crucial in supporting the sustainable food producers of today and tomorrow. Extension and Advisory services are important to keep current farmers and especially young future farmers interested in producing food and contributing to food security, young advisors with fresh knowledge are needed for this. However, rural advisory services all over Europe experience comparable challenges in recruiting, qualifying, and offering long-term attractive working conditions for young advisors. The development costs for individual trainee programs for a limited number of young advisors are too high. The international European EUFRAS-YPARD Young Advisors mentoring and training program allows especially smaller rural advisory services from all over Europe to become a more attractive working place for young specialists. This will contribute to achieving their tasks in strengthening rural areas. Particularly advisory services from smaller and new EU member states will benefit from the program, as funds for human resource development are simply often not available.

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