A few months ago I sat, very frustrated, waiting for my car dealership to complete some minor maintenance. As I begrudgingly paid the invoice, the manager apologized and offered an interesting explanation for the delay. He was short on mechanics, evidently because they had better opportunities at a defense contractor across the river that was rapidly snapping up any candidate with a hint of technical skills in its efforts to rapidly scale production.

Thankfully, the dealership gradually found new workers. Wait times are down, and the experience taught me a lesson about workforce and sourcing talent. As commercial and defense MROs look to serve imminent growth, how might they, too, reconsider the persistent constraints of workforce availability?

Viewed through the MRO lens, the state of the workforce is often described with words such as “competitive” and “scarcity.” The characterization of talent availability as a headwind for MRO growth extends from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates to skilled shop floor workers and is consistently echoed in Accenture’s biannual commercial aerospace research. While demographics and macroeconomics will always shape facts on the ground, MROs can take specific steps to mitigate their impact and constraints on capacity, throughput, customer service and profitability.

It starts with thinking differently about talent. MROs have always cared about their employees understanding the product and the tasks they perform. To address the talent shortfall, MROs must go beyond considering knowledge and experience to view talent through the lens of skills. MROs have drawn the path to knowledge and proficiency in a very straight line. Hiring graduates from key university programs, creating trade apprenticeships, tapping into military veterans and targeting underrepresented communities are all important steps in building the MRO workforce. A skills-based approach to talent takes things further by asking the basic question of what it takes to do a job well. The answers can be surprising.

It starts with understanding the specific skills that underpin competency in the work of a given role. This allows companies to identify candidates they may not have traditionally sourced, developed or borrowed. For example, in digital MRO, the skills required to develop a consumer-facing mobile app are directly transferrable to the flight line. On the shop floor, individuals from industries as varied as agriculture and network installation possess the core mechanical know-how to fill increasingly difficult positions in MRO.

A skills-based approach can also help MROs more easily identify internal candidates for “upskilling” or “reskilling” into new roles, moving into adjacent areas of need or for leadership and succession planning at a time of workforce transition. It also provides employees with a clearer view of how their individual skills fit into the success of the business.

However, this approach will not solve MRO workforce challenges immediately, since the industry has some very specific workforce constraints. In this highly regulated industry, experience and certifications are mandatory. Just because someone may have applicable skills for a mechanic role does not automatically confer them airframe and powerplant certification.

MROs and their industry partners will need to continue to invest internally and with OEMs, operators and regulators to improve the scale, pace and robustness of the certification process. Creating a skills-based organization may expand the pools from which to source talent, but the industry ecosystem must be ready to bring those candidates over the finish line to operate at the necessary levels of safety and regulatory standards.

The MRO industry is aggressively working to expand traditional sources of talent and make inroads into underrepresented sources of talent. Taking a skills-based approach can broaden these talent pools, create the foundation for structured and analytically driven talent sourcing and give internal candidates a marketplace in which their skills become a currency for career growth and customer success.

In a world where talent is “scarce” for MROs, shifting to skills creates opportunity to identify, attract and retain the people who will secure our industry’s return to growth.