Identifying Factors Affecting Strategic Human Capital Planning in Iran's Tourism Industry

Some thinkers considered the 21st century as the century of tourism, a clean, smokeless industry that has a great influence on countries’ development. Due to its attractions and unique travel destinations, Iran has a great potential for making use of the benefits of this industry. However, the country’s tourism industry has not been developed properly. One of the reasons for this problem, as experts believe, is lack of quality and talent employees in the industry. This should be dealt with by managers through strategic human capital planning in order to attract high-quality employees. Strategic human capital planning is a comprehensive, structured approach for the process of analysing the number and the kind of talented employees that an organisation or an industry requires in accordance with its current and future strategic directions. The authors have dealt with this process in terms of identification and explanation of factors affecting such planning attempts in Iranian tourism industry. This paper has been organised around this goal and conducted using exploratory mixed method along with qualitative content analysis in the qualitative part, along with surveying methods conducted using SPSS and LISREL software tools in the quantitative part. After acquiring theoretical sufficiency by interviewing the experts of the field and conducting qualitative content analysis on the interviews, a questionnaire was distributed containing 48 factors classified into four categories that were believed to affect strategic human capital planning in the country’s tourism industry in public, private, national and international levels.