How The MRO Industry Is Handling The Experience Gap

Widespread efforts in the maintenance, repair and overhaul industry to boost interest in aviation careers and create pipelines for new technicians are starting to make a dent in the labor shortage, but changing workforce dynamics are leading to different challenges for employers.

According to the latest Pipeline Report from the Aviation Technician Education Council (ATEC) and Oliver Wyman, the number of aviation maintenance technician school (AMTS) graduate certifications increased 31% in 2024 compared with the prior year. Overall enrollment at these schools also increased 5%, and graduates by 10%. Although the report forecasts that North America will have a 20% maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) workforce shortfall by 2028, industry initiatives to boost AMTS enrollment—alongside growing efforts to recruit experienced international and military veteran talent—appear to be slowing the bleed.

• Employers report skill shortages with new hires
• Industry is testing new training and retention strategies

The push to recruit, train and put new technicians on the shop floor as quickly as possible as the aging workforce retires is leading to a growing challenge of “juniority across the workforce,” Boeing warned in its 2022 Pilot and Technician Outlook.

In recent years, industry stakeholders have told Aviation Week that airlines are increasingly snatching up new AMTS graduates rather than waiting for them to gain a few years of experience at a repair station, which AAR also noted in its 2023 Mid Skills Gap Report. United Airlines, for instance, reported during ATEC’s annual conference in March that about 35% of its technicians have less than five years of experience at the airline, while around 47% are “retirement ready.”

During a panel about solving the juniority problem at Aviation Week Network’s recent MRO Americas conference in Atlanta, the majority of attendees polled reported that more than 40% of their MRO workforce has five years of experience or less. Panelists were unsurprised by these results.

“I think it is a positive,” said Hamish Guthrie, Pratt & Whitney’s vice president of aftermarket operations in North America. “I would be more fearful if this was a low percentage number. That would be saying: ‘We’ve got an industry that people don’t want to be a part of,’ and that’s not where we are.

“I think our job is to continue to attract people into our business and our industry,” Guthrie continued. “We’ve definitely got some work to do in terms of how we train those people, how we bring them into our operating culture, how they feel at home, such that they want to stay, ideally in the business that brings them in. But if we don’t do that, then we want to make sure we’re keeping them in the industry so that knowledge and talent pool is helping the entire business more forward.”

Skill Shortfalls

These changing dynamics, however, are creating teething pains for airlines that were used to poaching workers who had spent a few years developing experience at an MRO provider. During the ATEC conference, a panel of airline and business aviation leaders bemoaned skills gaps they frequently see in new technicians, ranging from basic technical tasks, such as safety wiring and sheet metal, to a lack of soft skills and workplace expectations they say are misaligned with the reality of the MRO environment.

“I’d be happy if I had a guarantee that [new AMTS graduates] could read a meter,” William Smith, Delta Air Lines’ director of learning and development, said while discussing avionics skill shortfalls. “We’re giving basic mechanical aptitude tests, and it’s ruling out too big of a percentage—20-25%—of our applicants with [airframe and powerplant] licenses.”

Smith also described deficiencies in critical thinking skills, troubleshooting and manual usage among recent AMTS graduates. “It’s clear they were taught on a manual system, but they are not used to using a manual consistently when they show up at work,” he said.

“The idea of coming to work on time, working in a safe, compliant manner, being professional and having good communication skills—we’re starting from ground zero,” he continued. “I’ve got brand-new hires that are showing up 10 min. late on the first day with a Starbucks because they stopped to get coffee, and when I remind them for the third time, they think I’m bullying.”

In response to complaints about skills gaps, Aviation Institute of Maintenance President Emeritus Joel English pointed out that AMTS programs teach basic skills, such as safety wiring, at the beginning of a multiyear program. “If we’re not retooling them and retraining them as they go, those basics are lost to the other more complicated things they’re learning,” he said. “That’s one thing for us to think about.”

English also cited the results of a survey ATEC conducted with recent graduates who are now working in the industry. He noted that while most respondents felt prepared for their professional job, many noted that AMTS facilities and training equipment were outdated and did not prepare them for the technology they would encounter in professional aviation. Most AMTS have small budgets and rely on industry donations of aircraft, engines, components and other training equipment.

Furthermore, English said survey respondents felt strongly that they would benefit from more hands-on experience and on-the-job training, such as internships and apprenticeships, during their time at AMTS.

During an MRO Americas panel of AMTS students and recent graduates, several speakers asserted that industry employers should work more proactively with schools to help develop soft skills and on-the-job training opportunities.

Tiffany Bolin, valedictorian of her class at the Aviation Institute of Maintenance, pointed out the “chicken and egg” problem of AMTS career fairs.

“We would have several employers come in and so many students dressed to the nines with professional resumes in hand,” she said. “We would hand them out to every single [employer], but we would get so many places that said, ‘Thank you for the resume, but we can’t hire you until you have your [airframe and powerplant (A&P) license].’ They come to the A&P school where we’re learning . . . and they can’t hire us yet because we don’t have [the license]. It just doesn’t make sense.”

Bolin noted that if companies offered more apprenticeships or if companies that were hiring for noncertificated maintenance positions would come to these career fairs, “then the students would actually be able to network and be able to start somewhere instead of graduating and then hoping for the best.”

Adam Dowling, founder and managing director of UK-based consultancy and brokerage Airmen Technical Services, tells Aviation Week that he sees a bow wave of new people entering the aftermarket industry and wanting to be licensed engineers.

“However, I think the old apprenticeship-style training and education piece is important,” Dowling says. “When I was growing up in the industry, you had . . . people going through a City & Guilds apprenticeship program, and they would learn everything from the grassroots. They would be on the shop floor as the mechanics seeing real-life situations, rather than coming out with a shiny new license and not having that hangar-wise, streetwise experience. The industry has to be careful that they’re not just churning out these clever licensed engineers who are there just inspecting—we need the doers as well.”

On soft skills, Bolin said it would be helpful if AMTS offered more mock interviews and workshops. For instance, her school’s Women in Aviation group provided talks on these topics, but “it blew my mind that only the women were getting this talk about soft skills and presenting [themselves] at interviews,” she said. “If schools do more classes like that with the entirety of the school, then it could become more [instinctual] to be professional all the time.”

Industry's Role

Fellow panelist Addison Kirkland, a 2018 graduate of the Aviation Institute of Maintenance and current director of maintenance at Bravo Air, said the MRO industry is in a pivotal moment in which multiple generations are trying to communicate and work together successfully.

“I found myself in intergenerational management where I had to speak to a legacy airman who had been in the industry before I was born, and then we have newer A&P mechanics that are coming in afterward,” Kirkland said of his current and previous positions. “Being able to speak the language to both sides and to keep that excitement going forward takes a certain mindset.”

Kirkland noted that not everyone has the drive to make it in the MRO industry. “I believe it’s up to us as aviation professionals to find and pull that out of people,” he said. “It’s not enough to just say to somebody: ‘You have to have the drive.’ I think it’s a two-way street.”

Guthrie said Pratt & Whitney is bringing in high school interns and working with many AMTS to make sure their curricula incorporate soft skills. “I think a large element of it is on us, as the employers, for how we’re going to develop the soft skills in those people,” he said. “I would love to go back and find my first manager from 25 years ago and ask them what they thought of my soft skills. You develop those over time. You don’t come out of A&P school at 18, 19 or 20 and have all the soft skills people are looking for.

“We have to train people and bring them up to speed about what our culture is, what’s important for us, how we want them to be and make them feel part of our company,” Guthrie continued. “If they’re excited to be in the aviation industry, we can absolutely build on that, and we can train a lot of the soft skills that we need to—it’ll happen over time.”

Smith said Delta is working with AMTS to modernize curricula and provide constructive feedback. “We’ve had to change our mentoring programs,” he explained. “We’ve had retired employees come back as mentors. We’ve established a lot more structured on-the-job training. We’ve increased the requirement for fleet initials and required training plans, and largely, when we get somebody new, if they’ve got really strong skills, then great—that’s a bonus. But we assume that they don’t, and we assume that we’re kind of training from scratch.”

Smith cautioned that this will be an uphill battle. “With COVID-19, we had a couple thousand people leave tech ops, and we hired a couple thousand people back,” he said. “The challenge is the people that left had 57,000 years of combined experience, so if I go hire two or three thousand folks, which we did, they’re not nearly as capable, and they only get experience one year at a time. So every year, we get another 3,000 years of that experience back.”

Jets MRO CEO Suresh Narayanan stressed the importance of industry involvement with schools during the MRO Americas panel. “If you work out a good partnership with a good A&P school, [the students] get exposure to your team, and then you have a hire when they graduate,” Narayanan said.

“I think programs like that are important,” he continued. “They help [students] see what really happens in an MRO. A lot of them are really surprised or have different expectations of what they think happens in school and what happens in industry, so getting exposure inside the MROs and . . . opening our doors, inviting students into the operation, will help us as industry leaders, because we want those folks who smile and get excited around an engine, a component or [aircraft].”

Other panelists noted the importance of technology in successful onboarding and retention. MHIRJ Aviation Group President and Chief Operating Officer Ismail Mokabel said his company “put a lot of money in technology and analytics because we had to be a lot smarter at understanding the [juniority problem].”

Rahul Ghai, senior vice president and chief digital and technology officer at AAR Corp., said the company sees technology as a way to make training more efficient and effective. Ghai noted, for instance, that two of AAR’s six airframe MRO facilities have gone completely paperless.

“A lot of the younger technicians are walking in from a digital world, and when you hand them a sheet of paper, it’s like they short-circuit,” he said. Moreover, Ghai said, AAR is starting to see that “technicians working in a digital environment are just more satisfied with the environment and how they learn on the job as well.”

Launch Technical Workforce Solutions President and Chief Commercial Officer Mike Reporto says his company is seeing success with its career advancement program, which works with MRO customers to gather performance metrics and milestones that new hires will need to achieve every three months for the first year of employment. Under this program, Launch partners new hires with senior mentors at client facilities, and as they achieve various milestones, they undergo performance evaluations and receive pay rate increases, which Reporto says helps with retention.

“It’s allowed our customers to accommodate junior technicians but also helped with their retention rates because the employees feel the company is investing in them,” he says. “They have a pathway to higher wages, which has been key so [customers] don’t have to worry about losing them to another competitor for 50 cents or $1 more an hour, like we would see pre-COVID.”

Boosting Benefits

While many airlines and MROs have boosted pay to entice more workers, several sources told Aviation Week they believe benefits and work-life balance could be even more competitive.

Narayanan said Jets MRO has started surveying technicians regularly to determine what is causing retention issues. “A lot of our technicians . . . want a work-life balance, not forced overtime,” he said. “They want better schedules. They want to be heard. They want to be part of the business. So we developed programs like no forced overtime, no on-call. We staff seven days a week so they don’t have to work weekends.”

Jets MRO also provides benefits, high pay, clear growth expectations and ways for workers to “move up the food chain,” Narayanan says. “Every month, we have things in place to make sure we’re getting feedback and listening to our folks before they fire us as an employer and we have to backtrack and learn why they left us. Our goal is to stay in front of that challenge, so the experience we pay a lot for to get into the organization and/or train doesn’t leave.”

The focus on pay versus benefits may be shifting generationally.

“Everybody obviously wants to make the most money they can, but we’re seeing that the younger technicians are more interested in the non-pay-rate benefits,” Reporto says. “We get a lot of questions around shifts, paid time off, schedules, staying in a location for a certain period of time and work-life balance, where traditionally, more senior folks only care about pay, and they’re likely to move to chase a premium. It’s definitely a changing dynamic, and our customers are doing their best to accommodate.”

During a workforce panel at MRO Europe in Barcelona, speakers pointed out that younger generations typically no longer stay in the same job for 25 years, so company culture is a key factor in retention.

“At the end of the day, if [technicians] think they can earn more money in other industries with a better work-life balance, you can’t blame them for moving,” Oaklands Global Group Managing Director William Finden said. “We have to be honest as an industry: It’s not all fun. There are jobs where you do need to be in the office or hangar five days a week, and there’s no way around that. But we’ve seen some really interesting shifts happening.”

Finden noted, for instance, that such companies as Caerdav are adjusting work schedules to give technicians summers off. AAR also is deploying a scheduling approach in some locations that divides work into four 10-hr. days, with a small crew on weekends to give technicians more weekend time off.

“[For] touch labor, I think it’s very difficult to accommodate post-COVID job-seeker requirements when you’re in such a hands-on business,” Airmen Technical Services’ Dowling said. “For what I would call the back-office support functions, disruptors are coming into the industry that are embracing artificial intelligence and software to streamline the mechanics of doing their back-office support functions, which will then allow a more flexible approach, whether that means working from home or working at a more family-friendly shift pattern.

“There are areas within the industry where organizations could do more, especially in that back office, to accommodate employees’ outside lives, so picking the kids up from school, reducing the reliance on childcare and all of that,” Dowling added. “It’s all of these non-work-related external pressures that ultimately then lead the employee to think: ‘I’m going to have to get a job paying better money or offering different services.’ ”

Although MROs might not be able to compete with airlines on salary, their ace in the hole could be better publicizing their work-life balance, suggests Stacey Rudser, president of the Association for Women in Aviation Maintenance and United Airlines’ aviation maintenance technician apprenticeship program manager.

“What I wish people understood about the MRO environment is that you get a better chance at a more family-friendly work-life balance,” she tells Aviation Week. “At an MRO, the scheduling tends to be a little less demanding. You may not have to work the night shift for 10 years, and you might be able to get a weekend day off.”

Rudser recounts that she had her first child while working at an MRO. “I didn’t have the benefits that I would have had working at an airline,” she says. “I didn’t have the maternity leave or those tangible benefits. But what I did have was a day-shift Sunday-through-Thursday schedule, and I had Fridays and Saturdays off and the ability to work a schedule where I could utilize more traditional childcare, so I didn’t need as much help from my family.

“I think what MROs are missing is promoting the quality of life that you can have when you’re working there,” Rudser adds. “I don’t think they take advantage of promoting [that employees have] a better shot at choosing if [they] want to work days, swings or nights. I think [MROs] would get more women coming to work for them if they did.”