When Iran began receiving a massive windfall of oil revenues starting in 1949, the usual attitude in the capital was that the money would be used to quickly turn Iran into an industrial superpower. This was a wildly optimistic assumption. While the huge amount of USD received in 1949 and large subsequent annual revenues was more than enough to import vast amounts of foreign machinery for infrastructure modernization and factory construction, most of the top economic advisers in the first Zahedi Ministry, including future Finance Ministers Ali Amini and Taqi Nasr (both foreign educated), were well aware of the various non-monetary bottlenecks hampering Iran's progress. Most important was Iran's vast shortage of qualified human capital.

This is not to say that the problem had been previously ignored. Both Pahlavi monarchs were in fact quite concerned about the problem - Reza Shah made it a priority to invest in higher education, a focus inherited by his son. The main problem preventing utilization of this capital was that most of the educated workforce not already thrown into the military was used in large-scale industrial enterprises, while most actual industrial employment occurred in cottage industry and other more informal arrangements. New innovation in technology and management simply failed to spread. Furthermore, the foreign-educated elite often had little interest in industrial pursuits, often choosing to focus on more lucrative careers in government or landlordism, while the traditional merchant class was uneducated and reactionary and those educated in local institutions were often unqualified.

The initial solution proposed by Dr. Nasr, foreshadowing the theme of the later 7-year development plan of 1949, was at the time considered mostly quite conventional. The unique aspect of his plan for talent development was that it focused almost exclusively on building institutional experience in industrial labor rather than building concrete technical skills. As Nasr himself put it, the purpose of the "Labor Pioneer" program was not to "educate our workers in how to use a loom or a lathe, but to educate them in the ideological foundation of capitalistic mass production."

Practically speaking, Nasr's plan was in most respects just a renewal of the prewar foreign scholarship program. Every year, the Iranian government would secure spots at foreign universities for up to 1000 members of the educated multilingual elite, who would primarily study various skills needed for administration or technical development. For the first time, however, entrance into the program was determined by an exam, commonly referred to as the "Konkur." While it ostensibly tested one's skills in a foreign language (the options being English, French, German, and Spanish, with special dispensation needed for other languages), Farsi literacy, and Math, the academic requirements were deliberately quite loose, and it was expected that most candidates selected using the previous system would still pass. The primary section of the exam section, which asked in Farsi: "describe what you see as the optimal development strategy for Iran and what role your own education plays in such a strategy." The purpose of the exam section was not to weed out candidates - it was not even scored. Instead, it was used to determine the political suitability of candidates - those determined to be in harmony with the ideology of the state were purposely directed to key areas of study and earmarked for key positions in the bureaucracy or state-owned industry upon their return.

The other aspect of the program was entirely new to Iran. It provided subsidies for managerial staff of all kinds of large and mid-sized industrial institutions, including the national railway system and essentially any textile industry staff that could be found, to work as day laborers for two years in industrialized countries while studying management practices. The intention was that while essentially zero Iranian foremen were qualified to take up a similar position in say, the United States, both for reasons of language and general competence, many managerial staff in Iranian industry were in reality just slightly over-promoted peasants with no education in the "cult of productivity." In theory, working as an assembly line worker in a deliberately alienating workplace culture among a visibly more competent and productive society would instill those same industrial values in the culture-shocked outsiders. Upon return, those workers would be employed in the large industrial enterprises in their former positions, while supervised by bureaucrats who had received formal training in the same concepts. Furthermore, their pay bonuses would be directly tied to measures of Total Factor Productivity - industrial output adjusted to hours worked and productivity of capital goods, in their sections. While in the short term this would deprive smaller enterprises of talent, the intention was to create self-sustaining "ecosystems" capable of producing capable industrial personnel which would be redirected to smaller enterprises over time through generous state-subsidized transplantation into managerial positions.

• Excerpt from Bartsch, "The Industrial Labor Force of Iran: Problems of Recruitment, Training and Productivity," Middle East Journal, 1952