Factors Affecting the Professional Development of Faculty Members: A Case Study of Ilam Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran

Professional development is a continuous process of individual and experimental tests that must empower individual educators to make complex decisions; to identify and to solve problems; to connect theory and practice in learners’ output; and to enable educators to offer learning opportunities to students and prepare them in terms of provided world class standards and citizen responsibilities of adults inspired by these assumptions, the present study aimed to identify factors affecting the professional development of its faculty members. The statistical sample consisted of 209 individuals all of whom were faculty members of the Islamic Azad University, Ilam Branch, Iran that were studied by a census method. The survey instrument was a research-made questionnaire whose content and face validity was confirmed by a panel of experts and its reliability coefficient turned out to be at a desirable level. SPSS21 software and factor analysis technique were employed to analyze the collected data. The results of the factor analysis showed that four development services such as structural-service maturity, institutional directorial maturity, personal and character maturity and network-social maturity were identified as factors affecting the professional development of faculty members which explained 50.89% of the total variance altogether.