Airports never stand still. Flights depart, passengers move, and operations are in constant motion. Yet, when it comes to workforce planning, too many airports are stuck in the past and still rely on spreadsheets, patchy records, and reactive compliance checks to keep things moving.
Unfortunately, workforce management isn’t a back-office task but one of the biggest strategic levers airports have to boost efficiency, improve retention, and stay compliant. And as our new whitepaper, Building the Future-Ready Airport Workforce, shows, it’s time to start treating it that way.
Globally, airports are facing a perfect storm: shortages of skilled staff, high turnover, and rising regulatory demands. According to the ACI Workforce Management Report 2025, attracting and retaining staff is now one of the industry’s most pressing challenges, compounded by competition from other sectors offering more flexible conditions and faster career growth.
At the same time, safety-critical roles in security, airside operations, and technical services mean you can’t just “make do” with whoever’s available. You need trained, certified staff in the right place at the right time. Without that, you risk delays, inefficiencies, or even compliance breaches.
Ask most airport executives a simple question: what skills do you have across your workforce today?
Many of them will struggle to give you an accurate response or even be able to point you to the data to answer that question. That visibility is critical and without it, leaders can’t forecast gaps, plan succession, or assure regulators.
Take Airport Development Group (ADG), which operates across three sites. By moving from scattered records to a clear, centralized view of workforce skills, they improved efficiency and reduced compliance risks. It’s a simple truth: you can’t plan for the future if you can’t see where you are today.
Training keeps you audit-ready, but it’s also one of the strongest retention levers available. The ACI report highlights career development as a top driver of employee satisfaction. When staff see a clear pathway for growth, they’re more likely to stay.
Look at Houston Airport System. By shifting from reactive training to structured career pathing, they built stronger engagement and created a pipeline of future leaders. Succession planning stopped being a headache and started becoming a strategic advantage.
Here’s the hard truth: spreadsheets can’t keep up with the complexity of modern airport operations. They’re static, error-prone, and completely unable to forecast future needs. Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends report backs this up: organizations relying on static workforce tools fall behind fast.
Airports Vanuatu and the Cook Islands both learned this lesson. After ditching spreadsheets for more dynamic systems, they gained real-time visibility, streamlined audits, and freed up valuable staff time.
So what does the future-ready workforce look like? It’s built on three pillars:
Real-time workforce intelligence: knowing what skills you have and what’s missing.
Career-aligned training: linking learning to progression and retention.
Integrated compliance assurance: embedding audit readiness into daily operations.
The benefits? Operational efficiency, resilience in the face of disruption, stronger engagement, and happier regulators.
Airports that treat workforce management as a tick-box exercise will struggle to attract talent, retain staff, and stay resilient. Those that rethink their approach today will be the ones thriving tomorrow.
Download the full whitepaper Building the Future-Ready Airport Workforce to explore the strategies and case studies in detail.