Aviation Maintenance: Role Design Drives Retention

Part 3 of our series with VHR Technical Recruiter Matthew Jasper - recorded ahead of MRO Americas 2026, Orlando, 21–23 April.

Read the series: Part 1 - Capacity Gaps in Technician Teams | Part 2 - Why Behavioural Traits Matter in Aviation Hiring

Meet the Contributors

	Jerome Gray is a Growth Marketing Specialist at VHR, focused on the aviation and defence sectors across North America and the Middle East. Jerome works at the intersection of market intelligence and recruitment strategy, helping VHR communicate the real challenges facing the industry, and the solutions that actually move the needle.
	Matthew Jasper is a Technical Recruiter at VHR specialising in aviation across the UK and North America. Working day-to-day with operators, MROs and maintenance providers, Matthew has a ground-level understanding of where talent is scarce, why it moves, and what it takes to attract and retain certified technicians in one of the world's most demanding hiring markets.

The Question – "How can organisations better align responsibilities, expectations and career progression in their role design?"

The aviation maintenance industry is losing people it can't afford to lose, and in many cases, the reason has nothing to do with pay. With North America currently facing a shortage of approximately 24,000 qualified mechanics, a figure projected to reach nearly 40,000 by 2028 according to Oliver Wyman, retaining the experienced technicians already inside your organisation is as strategically important as attracting new ones. Yet poor role design, unclear expectations, mismatched responsibilities, and invisible progression pathways quietly drives good people out the door every year.

Matthew's answer to this question draws on years of hands-on experience in both internal HR and specialist aviation recruitment. His argument, in short, is that most retention problems aren't retention problems at all. They're role design problems, and they're fixable.

Matthew's Answer

Matthew opens with a distinction that frames everything that follows.

"Organisations that get this right are the ones that design roles deliberately rather than letting responsibilities evolve informally."

In aviation maintenance, where licence privileges, endorsement scope and regulatory accountability are tightly defined, allowing roles to drift informally is particularly costly. Responsibilities accumulate, expectations go unstated, and the gap between what someone was hired to do and what they're actually doing widens, often without anyone noticing until a high performer resigns.

Building a Capability Framework, Not Just a Job Description

The first structural fix Matthew recommends is replacing the job description with something more substantive: a genuine capability framework.

A job description tells someone what they'll be doing. A capability framework tells them what good looks like at every stage of their development, the core technical skills required, the behavioural competencies expected, the licence and endorsement requirements at each seniority level, and a clear articulation of what they need to demonstrate to progress. The difference in practice is significant.

"If you have a very clear capability framework from the off on the onboarding side, you can set that out and it's straight away understood. And then it feeds into probation, you can score them against it, so you've got quantifiable real-world data on how they're performing."

From an HR standpoint, this serves two functions simultaneously. For the employee, it removes ambiguity, they know exactly where they stand and what they need to do next. For the organisation, it creates documented evidence of performance expectations, which matters enormously if things go wrong and matters just as much when identifying who is ready to step up.

The framework should run from day one through to the most senior levels, covering not just technical skill and licence requirements but behavioural competencies, communication quality, leadership readiness, human factors awareness, the ability to mentor or train apprentices. Progression, in Matthew's view, should never be purely about hours logged or type ratings accumulated. A well-built capability framework should include:

Core technical skills mapped to each role level, from entry-level A&P tasks through to certifying engineer responsibilities
Licence and endorsement requirements - what is held at the current level, and what must be obtained to advance
Behavioural competencies at each stage, including communication standards, SOP adherence, safety culture expectations and supervision style
What "good" looks like - concrete, observable examples of performance that remove subjectivity from appraisals and probation reviews
Progression criteria that go beyond hours and type ratings to include demonstrated leadership readiness and mentoring capability
Probation scoring built directly from the framework, giving both parties a shared, quantifiable reference point from week one

Match Responsibilities to Licence Level

One of the most common and most damaging role design failures Matthew sees in practice is scope creep: junior technicians being given senior-level duties with no roadmap, no additional recognition and no clear path to formalising what they're already doing.

"A frequent issue is giving junior technicians senior-level duties with no roadmap. High-performing organisations allocate tasks by actual skill and licence privileges - they prevent scope creep by redefining roles regularly."

This matters for two reasons. The first is regulatory - in an FAA Part 145 environment, task allocation must reflect certification and privilege scope. The second is motivational. A technician performing above their grade without acknowledgement, compensation or a clear path to formal progression will eventually look elsewhere. And in a market where every experienced technician is already employed and broadly settled, losing one is significantly harder to recover from than most organisations account for.

The solution isn't complex, but it requires discipline: regular role reviews, transparent communication about what each level requires, and a genuine commitment to moving people through the framework when they meet the criteria - rather than retaining them in a comfortable limbo. High-performing organisations approach this by:

Allocating tasks strictly by licence privilege - no technician is routinely performing work outside their certification scope without a formalised development plan in place
Conducting role reviews at regular intervals, not just at annual appraisal, to catch scope creep before it becomes embedded
Communicating clearly what each level requires so technicians performing above grade understand exactly what formal progression looks like and how to get there
Recognising informal contribution - if someone is already doing senior-level work, acknowledging it explicitly rather than allowing it to be silently absorbed into the role
Linking task allocation to training investment, so that where a technician is being stretched deliberately, the organisation is also funding the endorsements or upskilling that formalises that stretch
Documenting role boundaries in writing as part of the capability framework, making expectations enforceable and transparent for both parties

The Talent Management Trap: Promoting the Wrong People

Perhaps the most candid section of Matthew's answer concerns the single most common talent management mistake he sees across organisations at every level: promoting a high performer because they're a high performer.

"I've seen many companies fall into the trap of assuming that person is really good at that job, let's promote them. But sometimes just because someone is really good at a specific job doesn't mean they're well-suited to a management role."

The consequences play out in two directions simultaneously. The organisation loses its best practitioner in the role they were actually brilliant at. And the individual, placed in a management position they weren't ready for, loses confidence and can end up leaving entirely. The company has, in effect, generated two problems in an attempt to solve one.

The antidote is structured talent identification, building skills matrices, behavioural assessments, performance reports and leadership potential indicators from day one, not when a vacancy opens. Internal promotion is genuinely valuable: someone who already knows the culture, the processes and the team has a far shorter ramp-up time than an external hire. But it only works when the individual has been properly prepared ahead of time, with leadership exposure, structured coaching and real-world delegation built in progressively, not after the job opens. The tools that make this work in practice include:

Skills matrices updated continuously from onboarding, not assembled retrospectively when a management vacancy opens
Behavioural assessments that identify leadership potential as a distinct trait from technical performance, the two are related but not the same
Shadowing and delegation, when a manager is absent, using that window deliberately to give high-potential technicians real-world exposure to the responsibilities above them
Leadership courses introduced progressively, not as a one-off event at the point of promotion, but as a structured sequence over 12 to 24 months
Structured coaching from senior leadership, giving high-potential individuals a named point of contact invested in their development
Honest conversations about readiness, including the willingness to delay a promotion if the individual isn't there yet, even when a vacancy exists

"If you want internal promotions to work, you can't wait until the job opens. You need to have people prepared ahead of time."

Matthew also acknowledges the limits of this approach honestly. Internal isn't always the right answer. Sometimes a fresh external perspective is exactly what a team needs. And sometimes promoting someone before they're ready causes damage that outlasts the promotion itself.

For a broader view of how the MRO sector is tackling experience and succession challenges at an industry level, see our analysis: How the MRO Industry is Closing the Experience Gap.

The People Who Don't Want to Move - And Why They Matter Most

The part of Matthew's answer that often gets missed in conversations about career progression is what to do with the people who don't want to progress in a traditional sense.

"Not everyone wants to be promoted. There are people who are very happy where they are, and that isn't a bad thing."

These are, in many cases, the backbone of the operation. Experienced technicians with deep institutional knowledge, settled in roles they perform exceptionally well, with no ambition to move into management and no particular desire to be converted into leaders. Organisations that treat this group as a solved problem, stable, reliable, and low-maintenance, routinely underestimate how quickly they can become flight risks if they feel invisible.

Salary is part of the answer, Matthew acknowledges. But it isn't the whole answer. What this group responds to most strongly is something less tangible: genuine respect, autonomy and cultural seniority. Not a new title, but a recognised position, the person whose judgment is deferred to on the shop floor, whose experience is actively drawn on, who is trusted to work without being managed. A promotion in responsibility and respect, as Matthew puts it, rather than seniority. Practically, that looks like:

Regular salary reviews that reflect their tenure and the compounding value of their institutional knowledge, not just market rate adjustments
Genuine autonomy in how they approach their work, with less day-to-day oversight and more trust to manage their own workflow
Cultural recognition on the shop floor -being the person whose opinion is sought on technical decisions, whose experience is visibly valued by management
Involvement in mentoring or training junior technicians, giving them a broader contribution without requiring a formal leadership title
Stability in their roster and scheduling where possible, acknowledging that predictability and work-life balance often matter as much as compensation to this group
Being heard - regular check-ins that are genuinely two-way, not performance management exercises, where their feedback on processes and working conditions is actually acted on

When Someone Is Ready, but There's No Role

The final scenario Matthew addresses is one of the trickiest in talent management: the technician who has been developed, is ready to step up, but there is no vacancy to step into.

"You've given them the skills to do the role. They're at the point now where they can go into it, but the role isn't available."

The answer here is incremental growth through progressive delegation. Slowly increasing their responsibilities, drawing them into decisions that would normally sit with the level above, exposing them to leadership courses and experiences that keep them developing even without a formal title change. It keeps momentum alive and signals that the organisation hasn't forgotten them, which is often all that's needed to retain someone through a period where there's genuinely nothing to offer structurally. Specific ways to bridge that gap include:

Progressive delegation of managerial tasks - involving them in scheduling decisions, handover briefings or quality reviews that sit just above their current grade
Rotating leadership opportunities such as acting-up cover when a manager is on leave, giving them real experience without a permanent commitment from either side
Continued investment in leadership and technical training, cycling them through different courses to keep development visible and momentum intact
Transparent communication about the timeline, being honest that a role isn't currently available, while making clear the organisation's intention when one does open
Project-based responsibility, assigning them ownership of a specific initiative, a fleet modification programme, a new hire integration, a process improvement, that gives them genuine scope and visibility
Peer recognition and internal profile-building, such as involving them in client briefings or industry events, so their development is acknowledged beyond their immediate team

It won't work for everyone. Some people will leave, and Matthew is clear-eyed about that. But the investment is still worth making, both because the payoff when it does work is significant, and because even when someone eventually moves on, the organisation is left with a stronger bench behind them.

Talk to Our Specialist Team

Role design, capability frameworks, succession planning- these are the workforce decisions that compound over time, either in your favour or against you. VHR's specialist aviation recruitment team works with airlines, MROs and OEMs not just to fill vacancies, but to think through the workforce structures that prevent them from opening in the first place.

Coming up in Part 4: Matthew turns to onboarding - where clients most commonly underestimate the investment required, and what strong onboarding actually looks like in a safety-critical maintenance environment.