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An already widely discussed figure in aviation right now comes from Boeing’s 2025 Pilot and Technician Outlook. Suggesting that 710,000 new maintenance technicians will be needed over the next 20 years just to keep the global commercial fleet flying.
At IATA’s inaugural World Maintenance and Engineering Symposium in Madrid this June, Stuart Fox, IATA’s Director of Flight and Technical Operations, expanded on this idea. Fox reframed the shortage as something more specific than a recruiting gap and set out a clear path forward for the industry.
IATA called for reviewing recruitment, training, and licensing to cut timelines, expand reach, and improve job stability, with a particular emphasis on growing training capacity, streamlining qualification processes, and building stronger cross-border recognition of skills.
When we delve into this, inconsistent processes and cross-border skills recognition do not indicate a hiring problem: this is much more of a training and records problem.
The gap between hired and deployable
For MROs planning staffing years in advance, the hidden lag between being hired and being fully deployable often determines whether there are enough qualified people available when required, regardless of recruitment numbers.
The industry doesn’t just need more people entering the pipeline; it needs the pipeline itself to move faster and more predictably with emphasis on clear visibility on who is qualified to do what. This is something digital and AI-supported tools can help clarify.
The same dynamic shows up across safety, compliance, and training teams. When these teams are stretched, the issue isn’t workload but how quickly the organization can make sense of its own data. Much of that pressure traces back to the impacts of the COVID-19 disruption, which thinned out mentoring pipelines and left fewer experienced instructors to pass knowledge on. The warning signs include overdue reviews, recurring findings, and training gaps, but they are rarely brought together in a way that shows the bigger picture.
Border complexities
The problem compounds when we layer in the cross-border element. Aviation is a global labour market, but technicians typically train and get licensed under a single regulator’s framework. Regional shortages don’t consider these borders, so for the industry to fill gaps efficiently, a technician’s qualification needs to carry weight when they move to a different operator or MRO in a different country.
Credentials earned under one regulatory authority usually need extra verification, retraining, or paperwork before they’re accepted elsewhere. IATA identifies this as one of the two biggest levers for closing the technician gap, alongside faster qualification, which depends as much on documentation and verification as on training design.
For MRO organizations staffing across multiple countries, that friction shows up as a delay. A qualified technician may sit idle while credentials are re-verified, or risk being treated as less qualified simply because the records proving otherwise aren’t structured in a way the receiving organization can easily trust.
Where this becomes a records problem
Time-to-competence and cross-border recognition point to the same conclusion: this shortage won’t be solved on the recruiting floor alone. Getting this right is about helping organizations get more value from the technicians they already have. By making training faster and higher quality, whilst ensuring existing skills are recognized wherever needed.
Meaning that:
- Competency needs to be a structured, queryable record and instantly retrievable, rather than reconstructed for an audit.
- Qualification data needs to travel with the technician between bases, fleets, and jurisdictions in an immediately usable form.
- Training content and task cards need to stay synchronized, so procedural updates do not quietly widen qualification gaps.
When these connections are manual or scattered across spreadsheets, people spend too much time reconstructing context instead of identifying risks and taking action.
TrainingManager365 connects qualification tracking, recurrent training, and evaluation management as one system rather than separate tools, giving supervisors real-time visibility into who is authorized for what, regardless of where that authorization was earned.
The reframe that matters
Industry conversations are shifting towards how the industry develops, validates, and deploys expertise once people are in the workforce. This means making better use of the skills already available.
The challenge is not only attracting new talent but also helping technicians reach productivity faster while ensuring their skills are visible, trusted, and easy to verify. AI-supported solutions give MROs a clear, auditable view of qualifications and competencies. This helps demonstrate compliance, deploy technicians with confidence, identify expiring qualifications, and address training needs before they impact operations.
Rather than replacing training teams, connected platforms support better decision-making. They reduce administrative effort and help specialists apply their judgement more quickly and consistently.
Success will depend on giving MROs the confidence to deploy the right skills at the right time, wherever they are needed. In doing so, industry can better keep pace with demand in the years ahead.
