Economy

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Moteei-langroudi S H, Moradi H. Explanation of Agent's Professional Capabilities in Agriculture Jihad for Rural Development of Kermanshah Province. serd 2015; 4 (13) :93-109
URL: http://serd.khu.ac.ir/article-1-2571-en.html

Rural planning is one of the most important activities for agents and planners of development. Agriculture Jihad aims to accomplish rural development purposes through codification of plans and activities to increase the level of awareness and professional skills of villagers. In developing countries, it is a problem that rural planners do not have enough technical and professional information. Change agents in Agriculture Jihad as the engine of rural development have the responsibility to educate villagers and increase their level of awareness, insights and professional skills. Agents' professional development in Agriculture Jihad means using potential capacities of staffs which are not used completely at the moment. Today, economic development experts believe that using human resources which have been developed is the most important factor that effect on the process of socioeconomic development in countries. So, they have emphasis on investment in human resource development more than ever. On the other hand, changes because of globalization resulted in changes in human resource development and also characteristics of developed human resource and human resource requirements of labor market have increased in more dimensions. Creating communication is change agents' skill which means capability of planning, preparing and presenting profitable innovations to the villagers. On the whole, it can be said that professional empowerment is the process of continuous improvement in of Agriculture Jihad which is done by creating and expansion of dominance based on people and groups' competency on all the areas and duties and influence on staffs' performance and the overall performance of the organization in rural planning. Therefore, empowerment should be focused in order to develop human resource in Agriculture Jihad which results in empowerment and job satisfaction of the staffs and approaching to one of the rural development's purposes. So, regarding to the importance of the subject and since the operational systems of the organization are executed by humans and this is the most important investment of the organization, this study is implemented aiming to explain professional capabilities of the agents in Agriculture Jihad for rural planning. The study aims to answer this key question that "Whether agents of Agriculture Jihad in Kermanshah province have the professional capabilities of rural planning or not".

The study population includes all agents and rural development planners in Kermanshah province which is 456 people. In this study, all the staffs of Agriculture Jihad including manager, experts, technicians and constructive corps are called agents of Agriculture Jihad. The sample size is determined 210 people according to Morgan table. Sampling method was chosen randomly out of the respondents. Data collection tool was questionnaires and its validity was confirmed by some of the university professors and experts; its stability was determined using pre-test. Cronbach's Alfa was calculated 93% and 90% for professional capability in rural planning and entrepreneurial spirit respectively that shows the suitability of the data collection tool. For data analysis, descriptive statistical methods and referential statistics have been used. In descriptive statistics part, distribution of items' frequency and characteristics of respondents such as frequency and percent are measured and also the professional capability in rural planning and entrepreneurial spirit in management of Agriculture Jihad in Kermanshah province are studied too; in referential statistics part, correlation analysis and regression analysis are used. Data analysis is done with SPSS 20 software.

Discussion and Conclusion
According to these study findings, the condition of entrepreneurial spirit between agents of Agriculture Jihad in this province is more than the measured average level. The result showed that in organization staffs' point of view these parameters are considered as the most important ones in performing a job: having responsibility, job satisfaction and self confidence in performing the job and having the experience in the field of training courses for having job satisfaction and professional capability, job requirements' assessment for starting a job, motivation for improvement and using new and innovative methods for performing the job, having the spirit of forgiveness and sacrifice in group activities and having the ability to adapt to new environment. And there is also a great correlation between variables such as entrepreneurial spirit, age, effects of in-service training course and professional capability for rural planning which shows the importance and outstanding role of these variables in professional capability. The results of step by step regression showed that variables such as entrepreneurial spirit, up to date specialized information and contribution in in-service training courses had many impacts on agents' professional capability and these variables are able to explain 64 percent of changes in the case of professional capability for rural planning. So it can be said that, using information systems in developmental activities, training the skills and creativity techniques to the staffs are some of the actions which can be suitable areas for development of entrepreneurial spirit and these actions also provide agents' professional capabilities in Agriculture Jihad.