An Analysis of the Employee Training and Development System in Iranian Organizations (The Status Study)

The main objective of this study is to evaluate the current status of the employee training and development system in Iranian organizations. The study deploys a descriptive research design and a combination of survey approaches including field study, interviews, focus groups, longitudinal study and trend analysis for data collection. The main basis for data collection and analysis is a Training and Development Excellence Model, which is used for evaluating the organizations under study. The statistical population of the study is comprised of all Iranian organizations that are active in five businesses; services, manufacturing, health and medicine, finance and insurance, and education. Moreover, these organizations are categorized into (1) large and (2) small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) each of which are further divided into private and public businesses. According to this algorithm and using a combinational approach, 20 organizations are selected as the sample population from the four categories described above via purposeful single-stage cluster sampling. Apart from literature review, methods such as interviews and focus groups are conducted in the evaluation process. The collected data are analyzed for descriptive statistics including the indicators of central tendency and dispersion. Furthermore, levels of excellence are analyzed with radar logic. The results indicate that the status of training situation differs for types of business, sizes of enterprise and types of organizational ownership. Of the five types of business, organizations active in the banking and financial sector scored highest on three key indicators of training performance: the average direct cost of training per employee, hours of training per employee, and the ratio of trained employees to the total staff. Organizations active in the manufacturing sector had the highest performance only in the key indicator of the ratio of trained employees to the total staff. Moreover, large-sized organizations had a better performance than SMEs and private organizations had a better performance than public organizations in all the four indicators of performance. The findings also suggest that organizations active in banking and finance, manufacturing, health and medicine, education, and services have shown the lowest degree of overall satisfaction with training performance.