How did you wind up in your current position? What do you love about your job? What IS your job? What advice would you give to a high school student interested in pursuing a career in aviation maintenance?

Those are just some of the questions the Aeronautical Repair Station Association (ARSA) is asking industry leaders as part of its aviation maintenance career pathways video series. The videos are part of ARSA’s ongoing effort to recruit new talent to the aviation maintenance industry to ensure our members have the technical personnel they will need in the coming months and years.

You may be asking: Why now? Hasn’t the industry just laid off tens of thousands of workers because of an ongoing pandemic? If we need people so badly, why are people losing their jobs.

It is no secret that business conditions for the industry are terrible. While ARSA has not yet released the results of its special mid-year member survey on the impact of the pandemic on repair stations, the preliminary results paint a grim picture. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting a 25 percent year-over-year drop in aviation employment and it is likely our survey results will find similar job losses in the maintenance sector. Close to 90 percent of ARSA survey respondents say their revenues have declined since last year. And, while there is no consensus about when things will get back to normal, around 40 percent of respondents do not think it will be before the end of next year.

Things are grim now, but they will not be forever. Air travel will eventually reach pre-pandemic levels and continue to grow. When that happens, we are going to find ourselves confronting the same workforce challenges we were as recently as early March. Recall that just a few months ago a significant technician shortage was costing repair stations more than a billion dollars per year in foregone economic activity. When you combine the personnel losses repair stations have experienced since the start of the pandemic with the looming retirements of so many aging technicians, it’s likely that the workforce shortage will be much worse by the beginning of 2022 than it was at the beginning of 2020.

So, while ARSA is focusing on the present crisis, we are also planning for the future. That means intensifying — not abandoning — our workforce development initiatives. The video project described above is just one part of that effort. For years, ARSA has pursued a multi-pronged strategy: identifying and sharing best practices, obtaining federal resources to support technician recruitment and training, removing regulatory roadblocks, raising the industry’s visibility and encouraging students to consider maintenance careers.

We think ARSA does a pretty good job telling the industry’s story, but we recognize that the most effective spokesperson we’re going to have is someone who is currently working in the industry and passionate about what he or she does. It is with that in mind that during ARSA’s 2020 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. in early March we recorded a series of interviews with maintenance professionals from around the country who are at various stages of their careers. Our conversations focused on a range of topics, including how the interview subject wound up in our industry in the first place, what their company does, what they do for their company, what they love about their job and aviation and how someone just starting out can position themselves for success. You can see the first product of those discussions — with a focus on ARSA’s value, admittedly — at arsa.org/video.  

The next step will be to develop the raw footage into a series of short, less than 90 second, videos that ARSA and its members can post online to support our collective outreach to the next generation of talent. Some videos will focus on a single individual’s career path, while others will provide multiple perspectives on a common theme — e.g., all the various paths by which people end up in the maintenance sector, career advice.

While the project continues, and will continue, we encourage all maintenance professionals to stay focused on the future and think creatively about how deal with the technician shortage we all know is coming. If you would like to get more involved in ARSA’s workforce efforts and/or if you have a great story to tell about your own career you’d like to share, do not hesitate to reach out via arsa.org/contact.

Christian A. Klein is the managing member of Obadal, Filler, MacLeod & Klein, P.L.C. and is executive vice president of the Aeronautical Repair Station Association.