There isn't a talent shortage. There's a development shortage.

I said that to Ene Krinpus last week, and she agreed faster than I expected.

Ene runs Magnetic Talents (Engineering and Training Services) at Magnetic Group, about 350 people across their Part-145 training organisation and engineering services in Estonia. We first met on a panel discussion at MRO Europe in London back in October 2025. I'd read a few of Ene’s posts and blogs on Magnetic's site about why the industry needs to rethink workforce strategy, and wanted a proper conversation about it.

What came out of the call is what most of the sector still won't admit: there are not enough aviation engineers because the industry has never seriously committed to building any. And the engineers it does develop are being managed by people nobody has ever developed to manage them.

Two separate problems: the industry is barely addressing the first, and almost entirely ignoring the second.

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Everyone has seen the McKinsey number

McKinsey put it at one-fifth of aviation maintenance technician jobs going unfilled by 2033. The headline got reposted across the sector for a fortnight when it landed, then everyone went back to what they were doing.

The number isn't the problem. Anyone with a board pack has the number. The problem is that knowing the shortage exists hasn't translated into anyone seriously committing to filling it. Across the sector everyone is fishing in the same shrinking pool, complaining the pool is asking for too much (high hourly rates, flexibility, no night shifts), but doing very little about it.

Magnetic's response was to stop fishing. They built their own zero-to-hero pipeline. Five years, starting from people who'd never touched an aircraft. Ex-teachers, school leavers, career changers. Heavy filtering at the front, mentor-led work in the hangar, modules, exams, the lot. They don't depend on the wider pipeline because the wider pipeline isn't working.

We need to capture the knowledge and use mentorship correctly

Magnetic's first attempt at mentoring was the obvious one. If you're an experienced licensed engineer or a team leader, congratulations, you're now a mentor. It didn't work. The titles didn't translate into dedication, patience, or any real interest in teaching or people skills.

So they rebuilt it. Around 15 people, hand-picked, out of 350. Roughly 5%. Selected on experience, people skills, and whether they actually want to be a mentor. Academy intake is then capped at whatever those 15 can support. Magnetic could recruit more apprentices. They don't, because more apprentices without the mentors to back them would lower the quality of the engineers coming out the far end.

That's the bit most operators won't do. Mentoring gets treated as a free byproduct of seniority. A 40-year veteran with no interest in passing anything on isn't a mentor, he's an expensive engineer with a mentor badge.

Management is the layer nobody has time to fix

This is where Ene's argument got sharper.

A technical pipeline doesn't survive on its own. If the managers above it are running 40-year-old playbooks at engineers who grew up with open borders and a different attitude to employer loyalty, your retention numbers don't care how good your apprentice programme is, you’ll still lose them.

Not to a competitor. To a manager who doesn't know how to handle the career development conversation, who mishandles a concern raised on the shop floor, who gives no ground on anything regardless of the circumstances. Those aren't edge cases. They're the regular situations that decide whether someone stays or starts looking.

The old playbook on this was straightforward: if they leave, they're dead to us. And most operators still run it. I’ve seen it hundreds of times when my teams have been recruiting for the sector. Someone hands in their notice to go and get wider experience elsewhere and the door closes behind them.

Ene's line on this: "What worked well for you maybe 20 years ago doesn't mean it will work for this guy now." The adaptation has to come from the manager, not the workforce. Most operators want it the other way round.

Magnetic took a different view. Engineers are actively encouraged to go, get experience on different aircraft, different operations, come back. And they do come back, because the place they left is still worth returning to. They move through the different stages of life and want to return home, have a family, stability and familiarity. Ene's phrase was "hold them well, and not too tight, and they will come back." That only works if the managers doing the holding have actually been developed to mean it.

Magnetic now runs management development alongside the technical pipeline. Project managers, check leaders, team leaders. Built in deliberately, not added as an afterthought once the recruitment numbers got challenging. The adaptation has to come from the manager, not the workforce.

This is the version of the development problem the sector is not having. The shortage conversation is almost entirely about technical pipeline: certification routes, school throughput, training capacity. None of that touches the management layer. And the management layer is where the engineers who make it through that pipeline decide whether to stay.

Why most of the sector still won't do this

Magnetic is unusually open about what they're doing. The reason, as Ene put it more or less directly, is that they back themselves to execute better than anyone who tries to copy. The Apple analogy came up: you can have the blueprints for the iPhone, but without the people who actually build one, you'll end up with something different.

What stops everyone else isn't knowledge. Anyone could work this out in an afternoon. It's willingness. Willingness to spend on development before there's an obvious commercial case for it. To accept that some of those apprentices will drop out, some of those engineers will leave, and invest in the next cohort regardless. And to put manager development on the same footing as technical development, rather than as the first line the FD wants to cut.

This is where I spend my time. At Sytuate we develop managers in operationally heavy sectors, including aviation MRO, on the situations they actually face rather than the ones a workshop can simulate. Magnetic is one of a growing number of organisations in the industry that has decided to do something about the management piece. There should be more.

Most of the sector will keep calling this a talent shortage because it's the easier story to tell the board. The honest version is that it's a development shortage, and almost nobody is funding the fix. The operators who see that early will be three years ahead inside a decade. The ones who don't will spend it trying to recruit each other's people and will still be paying higher recruitment fees, higher hourly rates and penalties for missed deadlines in the next decade.

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