Interview by Australian Aviation with Aviation Australia CEO Glenn Ryan AM.
The aviation industry is facing an exodus of talent – but without the pipeline of new recruits to replace them. Here, training organisation Aviation Australia talks through the problems, and whether the White Paper did enough to fix them.
Aviation Australia is a registered aviation training school offering a range of engineering, pilot, cabin crew and remote pilot courses. With campuses in Brisbane, Cairns, Melbourne, Perth and Saudi Arabia, the organisation is also set to oversee Qantas’ upcoming engineering academy. Here, the company’s new CEO, Glenn Ryan, talks about how we encourage the next generation into the industry – and what the recent Aviation White Paper got right and wrong.
Australian Aviation: What did you think of the White Paper?
Glenn Ryan: The White Paper has done a great job of pulling out all those big macro issues. Who knows where we’re going to be in 25 years? But what we’re going to hit for the next decade is new fuels, new air systems and advanced air mobility. However, I think it probably didn’t go far enough in dealing with our actual workforce challenges. We’re workforce specialists, so we look at this in-depth. I think of the 13 workforces or different workforce families in Australia, almost 12 are structurally unsound because of demographic issues such as age and gender. Noting our workforce is global though, the quality of training in Australia is outstanding. Hence, anyone we train has the opportunity to move around the world. The White Paper didn’t pull out those two issues to provide new solutions that the industry could adopt, particularly the heavily regulated aspects.
AA: What do we need to do to encourage more people into our industry?
GR: Becoming a pilot is very costly. I’ve spoken to several young people, and that is the thing that worries them the most. I don’t think we’ve tackled that as an industry, nor in the White Paper, other than the reference to a certain airline needing to grow its own. More holistically, the industry’s actual issue is finding those motivated people and turning them into the brightest and best. When I look across our country, Queensland does it well: they’ve got a gateway program in schools that works between industry, government and training organisations to grow that talent. Now, Queensland has a healthy talent pipeline.
But as I move across to other states, I think it isn’t great. The federal government, the state government, industries and training organisations need to come together like Queensland has and generate that next generation. Without that pipeline being in schools and starting in schools to find motivated people, we will struggle as an industry to deal with these workforce challenges after 2030. COVID showed us what will come to us. The older generation said, “I’m not going back to the industry. I’m going to take my redundancy. I’m going to take early retirement.” The reality of that workforce cliff will hit us harder and harder over the next decade. We know from our workforce intelligence that there are more than 2,000 aircraft maintenance engineers who are going to walk away. That’s 60,000 years’ worth of experience that will leave. So it’s not just a workforce cliff – it’s an experience crisis that we’re going to face.
AA: How bad could the situation be?
GR: I can’t talk for the airlines, but we’ve faced several operational issues in the industry recently, and I would argue it’s because of the workforce. They couldn’t get their workforce spun up enough post-COVID to meet the demand that we all had. We potentially will get to that point where – whilst it calls out migration as a solution to some of our workforce needs – it’s not the only thing. We’ve got to be deep in schools, working with them to find that motivated workforce. If I can emphasise one story here, and it’s a personal story, but I’ve never missed a plane or had a flight cancelled because it didn’t have a pilot. Still, I have missed two services in the last two years because they didn’t have a cabin crew member who was fit for duty, or they couldn’t find a licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineer to sign off on the aircraft to fly. That can potentially become a future for us if we don’t deal with this workforce issue.
AA: Is the passion still there?
GR: Last week, I was at two gateway schools that built their aircraft. I mean, these are functional, CASA-approved aircraft. So there are a lot of talented, motivated people out there. We’ve just got to get industry, government, and the training organisations across every state to be in schools. Now, don’t get me wrong, those schools are also finding people that go, “I’ve tried these gateway programs, and I’m not too sure I want to go”, but that’s just as important as finding the future pilots, the future aircraft maintenance engineers, the future aerospace engineers. So I regularly see – particularly in Queensland and Victoria – a next generation that is highly motivated, but that’s partly because they’ve got dedicated programs supported by the government and industry.
AA: If you were in government, how would you improve things?
GR: I’d suggest two things. Firstly, we need a federal program for federal aviation. The White Paper called out that aviation is a federal issue, which will reduce the friction between moving from the federal government to the state government for the funding of training that CASA says is a regulator requirement. Moving aviation training and skills development to a federal level, and with federal funding coming through, would improve the throughput of that talented workforce, that motivated talented workforce that we spoke about before.
I think the second piece is we need a federal gateway-style program that the Queensland government runs so that we can encourage the next generation, whether it’s to keep the aircraft flying in and out of mining industries in WA, to keep the defence aviation industry going in South Australia or the general aviation in Northern Territory. Sure, we can continue to work with schools with curriculums to find that talent, but it requires a funding model that brings government, industry and training organisations together as one.
AA: How is the industry adapting to the future of aviation?
GR: There is an amazing future, and I wouldn’t call it once in a lifetime. I think we’ve learned that if this is the future, we will be disrupted by something new and different every five years. I think we’re going to see the speed at which things change will require training organisations like us to be better embedded with these startups. Here at Aviation Australia, we’re working with Whisk. And if you’re not aware, great news: CASA and Whisk just signed an MOU to work together on the future of advanced air mobility.
Aviation Australia is also working with Stralis. Stralis will be one of the first aircraft manufacturers that wants to build aircraft in Australia that will be hydrogen-powered, with zero fuel emissions and zero carbon emissions. This is what the future is. Maintenance training organisations (MTOs) and other aviation training organisations are going to need to partner with these startups to find the micro-skills, the macro skills, and, more importantly, the Australian Qualifications Frameworks that are required to build that workforce and to move the workforce across from traditional to new industries. That’s just the obligation. I think that will happen, and we will work closely with regulators to ensure that training is certified to keep us in a safe and sustainable industry.
AA: Will we be able to upskill our current workforce to adapt to these new technologies?
GR: I get this question a lot. We already have several training methodologies for gap training or upskilling for the current workforce to the new technology. So, electrification is hitting the industry right now. We already know roughly what the micro-skills are, and we’re offering those from an area perspective; we already know what the autonomous skills are, and we’ve got micro-skills for those until they get embedded in deep training programs. So we’ve already got the training solutions for this. The critical part in all of this is working with the regulators to ensure that the certification of that worker to sign off on that task is what’s required the most.
AA: How have recent changes to the migration system, and caps on training organisations, affected aviation?
GR: I don’t know how it will work because we haven’t seen how the caps policy will play out. The aviation workforce is global. Our people can go overseas because they’re highly trained and qualified. But at the same time, our National Aviation Training System requires us to train people who come in from overseas to keep these critical skills, like aircraft maintenance engineers, pilots, and air traffic controllers, up to the levels we need. So, we need to be careful over the next two years that the reduction in caps or the application of caps to many training institutions doesn’t threaten the viability and the sustainability of growing our national workforce. And from looking at the caps across all of the industry, not just Aviation Australia, it will risk our national training system. And I know the government is looking at that carefully. Still, we’ve got to ensure that we have a healthy workforce to generate the outcomes that the White Paper wants. While we do have a cost-of-living and housing crisis, the aviation industry also has an experience and skills crisis. So we’ve got to address that from a global, regional and local perspective.