ABSTRACTS

In order to stay competitive in a global dynamic business environment, organizations need to respond to and follow the rapid pace of its changes. Organizations understand the need for the training of their employees, as one of their major resources, and realize how much they must invest in it. This thesis attempts to identify criteria and analyze their interaction with training course alternatives, in order to prioritize the courses and deliver the right one, at the right cost, at the right time, to the right learners and ultimately help the organizations remain competitive in their industries. Interaction and trade-offs between criteria and alternatives involve dependence and feedback. As using qualitative and quantitative method, the analytic network process (ANP) is proposed as the most appropriate method for eliciting the preference of the decision makers in offering employees the right training courses. The applicability of the decision analysis model through analytic network process to the prioritization of offering training courses is simulative tested to one company as our case study. The results indicated that ANP provides the decision makers an analytic tool for evaluating their decision regarding offering strategic training courses to their employees and led to the prioritization of the courses to be consistent with the maximization of the underlying overall business expectations.

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