Putting people at the centre: a conversation with Klayo's founders

With the new version of Klayo now live, we sat down with Eddie and Robyn Ragauskas, the founders of Ceventas and the people behind both Klayo and the Online Learning Centre (OLC), to talk about where the idea came from, what shaped their thinking along the way, and where they see it heading.

The challenge they kept running into

After two decades of delivering online learning to airports, around 60,000 hours of training a year, a question consistently surfaced that most airports found surprisingly hard to answer.

“It uncovered a challenge,” Eddie says. “How do we help airports better understand the current and future workforce they required to run a world-class airport? Safe, secure, and with a wonderful customer experience. Because the better your understanding of those workforce requirements, the better your business outcomes are going to be.”

That question has two halves. The first is knowing what good looks like, the knowledge and skills the workforce needs to optimize operations and the second is knowing what knowledge and skills the current workforce has today. Put those together and you get a clear view of the gap between the two. Once you can see the gap, you can build a plan to close it.

Robyn saw the same thing from the other side of the table in the conversations she was having while talking to training managers.

“When we asked what training was needed, sometimes the answer that came back was: what training do you have?” she says. “That challenge came from not having complete, easily accessible data regarding what their people had already completed. They could see the training they had completed with us, and separately what they had completed internally, and separately again what they had completed with another provider. But they had no way to see all this information in one place.”

From ad hoc to a continuous loop

The fix was never only about better records. It was about changing the shape of workforce development itself, moving it from a series of one-off assessments and purchases to something ongoing.

“Ad hoc training that isn't aligned to the company’s strategic objectives or to the needs of the individual has limited value,” Eddie explains. “It's still valuable, but limited. If you can align it to the needs of both the company and the individual, you get a much better outcome. And if you can turn that into a feedback loop, combining the training with the workforce planning, you create a continuous improvement cycle.”

That loop is the heart of how Klayo works. You deliver the training, you move the needle, and then you track, manage, and report the results back into the platform, which gives you the intelligence to plan the next step. Made self-service, the loop becomes self-perpetuating.

“You're not really buying training, what you're buying is skills and competencies. Align those to the individual and you add value. Align them to the organization and you add value. Do both, and the return isn't just doubled, it compounds.” Eddie adds.

The data that simply didn't exist

Airports have long looked to bodies like the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Air Transport Association, and Airports Council International for guidance on what an effective and efficient workforce looks like. What they didn't have was industry-wide workforce data that was both easy to access and easy to use. That absence is what led to Klayo Intelligence.

The approach is methodical and based on standard job - task - skill analysis. Start with a job, break it into responsibilities, duties and tasks, then into the competencies each task requires. “Once you know what people do, and the competencies required, you can work out exactly which training moves them forward,” Eddie says. After eighteen years in the industry, the team has mapped over 1,250 tasks involved in running a world-class airport, and that data now sits inside the platform.

It also unlocks something airports have never been able to do easily: compare themselves to the rest of the world. “If your airport is on Klayo, you can see how you're tracking against your own job description and competencies,” Eddie says. “Then you can switch to the global view and see how you compare on an international scale. That's fascinating. You start to see which skills are valued elsewhere that you might not have locally, and L&D managers can benchmark their operations against global standards.”

Putting the person at the centre

Ask either founder what they're most excited about and the answer lands in the same place: the person using it.

“One of our values is customer centricity,” Eddie says. “When you design the experience, you have to put the person at the centre of it, the way airports do when they design their terminals. Training is exactly the same. You build it out from where the individual is, and where you're trying to take them.

For Robyn, that's where the value really shows up. “The training is great and we get a lot of positive feedback, but now we can offer so much more. The learner can set their current role, see the tasks and competencies it calls for, understand what training closes the potential gaps, and look at where they could go next. They get recommendations of further training based on the role they are currently in and the role they'd like to move into. All in one place. That's genuinely empowering.”

That empowerment is also the reasoning behind the Skills Passport, which is free to every learner. “Everything sits there. Not just the training they do with us, but their licences, certifications, on-the-job, and internal training, everything. It's theirs, and it goes with them wherever they go. And if their airport later adopts Klayo, it plugs straight in.”

A workforce that looks very different now

Eighteen years in, both founders point to the same shift: airports value the development of their people far more than they used to.

Robyn credits some of that to a change in mindset, and some to circumstance. “COVID opened the door to online delivery. Some airports had been hesitant, but once they tried it, they saw how impactful, efficient, and cost-effective it is across large groups in their organization.”

Eddie sees a deeper demographic change underneath it. For decades, most people working in aviation came from an aviation background, drawn by the excitement of the industry. That's no longer a given. “A lot of people now come in without any aviation background at all,” he says. “So the role of training and upskilling them has had to take a front seat. A good share of our catalogue is technical and operational, which helps new entrants who arrive with strong people skills get up to speed on the technical side of running an airport quickly.”

The airports themselves have broadened too, from places that land aircraft into something closer to campus cities, with retail and hospitality experts shaping the experience, and non-aeronautical revenue now topping 50% at many airports around the world. “The business model has evolved,” Eddie says, “and all of these processes need to evolve to match. I think AI and how we deliver knowledge will only accelerate that over the next ten years.”

Where it goes next

The ambition is scale, and reach. “The more people we support, the more we are able to help the industry,” Eddie says. “It's delivering individualized services at scale, giving people access to things that previously didn't exist.”

And it's a wider industry than airports alone. “So far we've worked very closely with airports,” Eddie says, “but the people inside them connect to civil aviation, ground handlers, and airlines, and we are increasingly working with that extended part of the airport ecosystem to service and support the global air transport system.”

It's a big vision, but it keeps circling back to a simple idea, the one Robyn returns to again and again: put the user first. Get that right for the learner, and you get it right for the airport, and for everyone who moves through it.