Eddie Ragauskas is the CEO of Ceventas, the company behind Klayo as well as the Online Learning Centre. With nearly two decades of experience supporting airport workforce development globally, he has a perspective on where the industry has been, where it is heading, and what needs to change. We sat down with Eddie ahead of his upcoming speaking engagements at the Australian Airports Association Ops Forum and the Business of Airports conference to talk about the workforce challenges that keep airport leaders up at night.
The biggest shift is that workforce conversations have moved from operational to strategic. For a long time, the people's side of airports was managed almost entirely through compliance and scheduling. You made sure everyone had the right tickets, you filled the roster, and you moved on. What has changed, particularly in the last five years, is that airport leaders are starting to connect workforce capability to operational outcomes. They are asking different questions: not just "is everyone trained?" but "do we have the right people, with the right skills, ready for what is coming next?" That is a fundamentally different starting point.
Honestly, it is pain. The pandemic stripped out experienced professionals at a scale nobody anticipated, and the rebuild exposed just how fragile many workforce systems were. Airports discovered they did not have a clear picture of what their people could do, what gaps existed, or how to close them quickly. At the same time, the talent market tightened. You cannot just replace people anymore, at least not at the speed and cost that used to work. You put all of that together and it means that leaders are being forced to think about retention, development, and planning in ways that were not on their agenda five years ago.
Because small and medium airports face a version of the workforce challenge that is, in many ways, more acute than what the large hubs deal with. When you have a smaller team, every person carries more responsibility. Losing one experienced staff member can create a real operational gap. So the ability to develop people who can work across functions, who understand more than just their primary role, becomes a survival strategy, not a nice-to-have. The challenge is doing that intentionally, with structure and visibility, rather than relying on informal knowledge sharing that disappears when someone leaves.
Technology does not operate itself. Every new system, every process improvement, every piece of automation still depends on people who understand how to use it, manage it, and make decisions around it. I think the industry sometimes gets distracted by the technology conversation and forgets that the workforce conversation is a prerequisite. You can invest in the most advanced systems in the world, but if your people are not equipped to work with them, or if you cannot retain the people who know how they work, you have not actually moved forward. Workforce intelligence is the foundation that everything else sits on.
I am optimistic because the conversation is evolving and because we now have solutions to offer to airports that are willing to do the work. Five years ago, workforce planning was not something most airport CEOs were talking about in strategic terms. Today, it is starting to appear on the agenda of major industry conferences. The data is getting better, the tools are getting better, and the leaders who are leaning into this are seeing real results, in retention, in compliance, in operational confidence.
We started Klayo because of that realization that, when it came to training, airports were looking backwards at what had been done but very few of them were also looking forward and considering what needed to be done. This was partly because of a lack of strategic interest into workforce development but also because there was no easy way for airports to access that data. Now, we have Klayo. And for the airports that use it, the airports that treat their workforce as infrastructure, not as a cost center, we know they are going to be the ones that thrive over the next decade. That is not a prediction, it is already happening.
Connect with Eddie on Linkedin.