The Educational Needs of Green Care Professional in Republic of Korea

Due to the rapid growth and change of modern society, people want to take rest and want to be comforted. Tradition depicted as follows, "Eating alone" and "drinking alone" are being created in Republic of Korea. Green care, which combines the various resources of agriculture and rural surroundings to care and therapeutic activities, has already started into an industry for the stress diminishing of modern people. For the development of Green care business, the professionals’ competency is the very important. The purpose of this study is to analyze the competency gap between ideal competency and the existing competency of 79 Green care related business or organizations in Republic of Korea. It has been analyzed the needs assessment by using IPA method in Borich needs assessment, and The Locus for Focus Model by Cho. In this research, it found that Green care professional need to develop the business plan and financing competency, business promotion and marketing competency, customer security and protection competency, business networking and resource searching competency, customer collecting and management competency (maintenance, expansion, monitoring). For the results, we should recommend that Green care professionals are required to have professional management skills such as sufficient ideas and experience to carry out Green care activities, business plans, business fund, publicity and marketing, security, and customer management for business expansion should be trained for more able manpower.