AIN’s 2024 Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit (CALS) West brought together business aviation thought leaders to examine and discuss some of our industry’s pressing issues. The session’s topics included hiring/DEI, compensation, training challenges, legal aspects of business aviation, generational differences, employee retention, maintenance, and sustainability.
While transitioning to SAF gets all the headlines, according to the CALS West attendees, an even more pressing sustainability issue faces flight departments: the need to hire and retain qualified people. Because of competition from other industries and young people's lagging interest in aviation, the problem is approaching a crisis point.
The attendees identified four critical recruiting and hiring areas that significantly impact our industry’s future: finding talent, encouraging aviation as a career, culture shifts, and the challenge of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I).
It’s Not Just a Job, It’s an Adventure
People continually lament that “nothing changes in aviation,” and that’s been true when it comes to our recruiting practices. As a chief pilot put it, “We pretty much fell into the pattern of hiring from the same places from similar backgrounds, whether it was a particular school, field of study, or even a previous employer. That doesn’t work today. If we keep going the same way, without a pivot point on point, we aren’t going to solve our problem.”
The nearly unanimous conclusion was that the first step to creating a solution is for the entire business aviation industry to become much more proactive in getting the message out that ours is an excellent career choice.
“A broader awareness of the career opportunities in our industry benefits us all,” a flight department manager said. “We need to develop educational outreach programs that say there’s more to aviation than United and Southwest.”
With some initiatives in place already, it’s not as if the industry isn’t trying to spread the word. But there are so many channels fighting for young people’s attention today. One solution might be to target more of our efforts toward reaching the next generation where they live—on their phones, tablets, and laptops.
Influencing the Influencers
What’s the number-one career choice of young people today? According to a survey by LEGO, it’s being a YouTuber. Next come being an athlete, gamer, or musician. Being a pilot didn’t make the list.
“The only career kids are exposed to daily is [that of] an influencer,” the session’s moderator explained. “Can we become our collective influencer for our industry? We can if we creatively reach them on their home turf and in their native language, so to speak. We know they’re not picking up aviation trade magazines today.”
While it’s not easy, it’s certainly not impossible. Unfortunately, when young people see private airplanes on YouTube, it’s usually because their favorite sports or entertainment celebrity is on board. Our messaging needs to be that someone has to pilot and maintain those “cool rides.”
And those are just two aviation careers. There are plenty of others, and even more when you start introducing drones, eVTOLS, and the like.
“It’s the same thing that attracted us to aviation when we were kids,” a chief pilot said. “You have to believe that if we can show what we offer today, as well as the amazing technologies we have on the horizon, that it will ignite something in these kids.”
The ‘Right Stuff’ Is Often the Wrong Message
Even if a young person longs for an aviation career, he or she will face real and perceived roadblocks on the path to it. Take popular movies like Top Gun. The main characters are stereotypical “jet jocks.” Women and people of color are playing secondary roles at best. Few young people want a career in the background.
“The culture of our workplaces is key to getting our message through,” a flight department manager said. “People are more likely to want to join a company—or industry, for that matter—that has a great culture.”
The CALS West attendees agreed that as an industry, we need to promote business aviation as having cultural and ethnic diversity to help attract the talent we so desperately need.
“Our aircraft are flying all over the world because companies are looking for international expansion,” a senior flight department manager explained. “That’s where the opportunities are. We cannot successfully accomplish this if we do not recognize the importance of the countries and cultures where we are trying to sell.”
“A broader awareness of the many opportunities in our industry benefits us all,” an MRO manager said. “We need to demonstrate to the next generation that a career in aviation is exciting, it’s rewarding, and it’s open to everyone.
The ABCs of DE&I
Before our attendees got into what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) is, they established what it isn’t. It’s not all about quotas. It’s not all about race. It’s not all about gender.
Within the confines of creating a sustainable workforce for business aviation, DE&I is about creating a welcoming culture that will attract the incredible talent and diversity available to us from a variety of backgrounds and lifestyles.
And while it’s been slow to gather momentum, DE&I hiring practices are proving to be a positive move by companies that adopt them. Multiple attendees shared that their hiring managers were not just seeing more diverse candidates; they were seeing more qualified candidates who actually wanted to be on their teams.
While it’s true that the CALS West attendees were a tiny sampling of what a proactive DE&I strategy means to business aviation as a whole, there is a lot more data available that sheds a positive light on the initiative:
Diverse teams are more innovative. A McKinsey study found that companies with diverse executive boards have a 25 percent higher likelihood of outperforming their non-diverse counterparts in terms of profitability.
Diverse teams are better at problem-solving. A study in the Harvard Business Review found that diverse teams make better decisions 87 percent of the time compared with homogenous teams.
Diverse teams have better financial performance. A Boston Consulting Group report revealed that companies with more diverse management teams have 19 percent higher revenue due to innovation.
Diverse teams have a broader global reach. According to a Forbes study, diverse companies are 70 percent more likely to capture new markets.
Diverse companies are better at attracting talent. A survey by Glassdoor found that 67 percent of job seekers consider workplace diversity an important factor when evaluating job offers.
As the session’s moderator summed it all up, “We need to have a workforce that reflects these areas and can help us to succeed. We need to create programs that highlight and promote that cultural awareness. I believe it would be very shortsighted of Gogo or any other company to think we could be a successful international presence with a lack of cultural diversity.”