In 2018, the IATA’s Aviation Human Resources Report described an airport sector that had barely digitized its training at all and where professional development still happened the way it had for decades: in a classroom, with an instructor, on a fixed schedule, and with staff that had to be pulled away from operations to be there.
Less than two years later, the Covid-19 pandemic made that model collapse pretty much overnight. What replaced it has been one of the fastest infrastructure shifts the aviation sector has ever seen.
Airports now deliver structured professional development across online, virtual, and in-person channels. ACI, ICAO, and IATA have all significantly expanded their digital training delivery and online learning now reaches workforces that classroom models could never serve at scale. Not only that but it does so at up to 80 percent lower cost than traditional approaches.
The digital shift is only the surface story. Underneath it, the way airports develop their people is changing in a much more significant way.
A sector caught between two pressures
The shift from in-person to digital was not just a response to the pandemic but was, in reality, the only viable answer to a workforce crisis that has not gone away since. It’s true that airports have lost up to 40 percent of their staff between 2020 and 2022 but 4 years later Boeing still projects demand for nearly 2.4 million new aviation professionals by 2044, with two-thirds of that figure driven by attrition and retirement rather than growth.
The professionals who left took institutional knowledge with them and the professionals replacing them have widely different expectations. Research from PwC, Deloitte, McKinsey, and LinkedIn all points to the same conclusion: younger workers prioritize learning opportunities, career mobility, and visible investment in their development which means that static role structures and compliance-only training models no longer hold them.
This is the context now forcing airports to think about training differently.
From compliance obligation to strategic infrastructure
For most of its history, airport training existed because regulators required it. Nowadays though, the current workforce pressure added to the expectations of the younger generation are forcing airports to treat training as a system that develops careers, retains experienced staff, and builds the capabilities airports will need a decade from now.
The financial case alone is hard to ignore. Aviation HR consultancy Retensa estimates that replacing a skilled aviation professional costs between 75 and 300 percent of their annual salary and, at the scale at which airports operate, even modest improvements in retention can pay for an entire training program.
The strategic case goes further as ACI World’s 2025 Workforce Management at Airports Analytical Report found that airports embedding clear growth pathways into the employee experience significantly improve retention, engagement, and operational resilience. Across the industry, this translates into meaningful initiatives:
- ACI-NA introduced a workforce development accreditation in 2025,
- ATA has built portable credential models,
- and the Global Aviation and Aerospace Skills Taskforce now involves more than 70 organizations and 100 experts.
Across the sector, training is steadily moving from a line item to infrastructure.
What this means for the year ahead
Behind this shift are five forces working in parallel:
- The pandemic made digital delivery permanent.
- Workforce pressure reframed training as a retention tool, not just a compliance one.
- New domains like cybersecurity and AI literacy moved into the core curriculum.
- Competency-based and stackable credentials began replacing time-based qualifications.
- A generationally different workforce arrived with different expectations of what professional development should look like.
None of these forces operates in isolation but, put together, they represent a structural turning point that demands a more deliberate approach to workforce development than the industry has needed before.
If you are responsible for workforce development at your airport, this is the moment to review your current program and decide whether your training system is built for the month ahead or the decade ahead.
