Identifying and Prioritizing Strategies for the Development of Human Resources in the Tourism Industry of Isfahan Province

Problem definition:

 According to the report of the World Economic Forum in 2019, Iran is not in a good position in terms of tourism competitiveness. Existing statistics also do not show a significant annual figure of foreign tourists visiting. On the other hand, today human resources and their management and development are one of the key factors in the success of using tourism as a factor of sustainable economic development and increasing employment opportunities, income and profit from tourism operations in each region.

The purpose of the present study was to identify and prioritize human resources development solutions in Isfahan tourism industry.

This study is applied in terms of purpose and survey method. In this study, qualitative content analysis method was used to extract tourism development human resources solutions and then by distributing a questionnaire among 20 tourism experts and prioritizing them using TOPSIS method.

The findings of the study suggest 11 strategies in 3 dimensions of executive, educational and incentive strategies that, according to the TOPSIS method, provide general education strategies, enrich and target training courses, design retraining courses and continuous development of professional skills. Preparation of human resources competency map in tourism industry and development and monitoring of public and private scientific centers of tourism industry in Isfahan province are the most important human resource development solutions in Isfahan province.Innovation: In this study, for the first time, human resource development solutions in the tourism industry of Isfahan province were identified and classified using qualitative content analysis and prioritized using TOPSIS technique.