By Angy Odysseos - Tomorrow’s Voices lead / CANSO Media Relations Manager
Air traffic control is a profession built over time. Not just in the seconds and split-second decisions that shape every flight, but in the years – often decades – that it takes to build the expertise that keeps the system safe and efficient.
For a long time, the industry asked one question of its workforce strategy: how do we train enough controllers? A more complete set of questions has now arrived. How do we attract them in the first place? How do we build training capacity that can actually absorb the demand? And how do we develop the right kind of experience for a role that automation is substantially redesigning?
Workforce sustainability in Air Traffic Management (ATM) requires a balanced focus on attraction, training capacity, experience building and retention – and a clear-eyed view of what experience will need to mean in the system that is coming.
Attraction and visibility
Most Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) struggle to recruit the people they need because most potential candidates have never even heard of the profession. Outside aviation, awareness of air traffic control careers remains limited. Many young people understand the pathway to becoming a pilot. Far fewer know what air traffic controllers do, what an air traffic safety and electronics personnel (ATSEP) does, or how to become one.
This is the dimension where pipeline development sits – outreach, visibility, early engagement, schools and university partnerships, and initiatives like CANSO's Tomorrow's Voices.
Tomorrow's Voicesis an initiative led by CANSO with the aim of connecting students, recent graduates and early-career professionals with the people, technologies and decisions shaping the ATM industry. It runs mainly during Airspace World – the world's largest ATM event – and is open to students and young professionals with an interest in aviation, engineering, technology or air traffic management. Its focus is attraction: making the industry visible to people who would otherwise never encounter it and giving future professionals an early sense of where they might fit.
CANSO's 'Guardians of the Skies' video campaign is part of this effort – introducing the profession to a public audience and highlighting the vital role air traffic controllers play in keeping the world moving.
A 2025 survey by Firstfruits Services of people aged 28 and under found passion for aviation strong – most expected to remain in the industry within five years. Young professionals ranked meaningful work, total compensation and wellbeing as top priorities. Environmental sustainability was a concern, but not a deterrent. This shows that the problem is not motivation but visibility.
The goal is to make aviation a visible and appealing career path across the full set of roles – ATM, ATCOs, ATSEPs, engineers, airspace designers, AIM officers and the operational leaders who connect them.
Training capacity
Even where attraction works, training pipelines often cannot keep up with the demand. Qualifying an air traffic controller takes years of structured learning, advanced simulation and supervised live operations. By the time a controller is fully operational, ANSPs have already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in training, facilities, instructors and supervision. Simulator hours are finite. Instructors are themselves a scarce resource, drawn from the same operational pool ANSPs are trying to grow. And the cost of a failed trainee is borne entirely by the operator.
That investment does not always sit with the operator alone. In several countries, trainees bear a significant share of the cost themselves – programmes that can run to tens of thousands of dollars before a single operational hour is logged. This raises a question the industry has not fully dealt with: are we attracting the best candidates available, or only those who can afford to try?
A mid-size ANSP in a fast-growing market faces different constraints from a smaller operator with seasonal demand or a major hub running at saturation – some limited by funding, others by instructor availability, others by regulatory throughput. There is no single global model for how controller training is financed or delivered. Some ANSPs fund training fully as a public service obligation. Others operate cost-sharing arrangements with trainees. Others still rely on private training organisations or hybrid public-private structures.
Without common frameworks for measuring training investment and outcomes, it is harder to quantify the long-term impact of workforce loss – or to have an honest conversation about whether current arrangements are producing the widest and strongest possible talent pool.
Experience vs Automation
Real expertise in air traffic control has always been built the same way: through volume. Thousands of routine separations, standard handoffs and predictable traffic flows build the reflexes and situational awareness that a controller depends on when something goes wrong. The unusual situation is handled well precisely because the controller has worked through ten thousand ordinary ones first.
The Complete Air Traffic System (CATS) Concept of Operations sets out a future in which that model no longer holds. Automation will not merely assist controllers with tactical decisions – it will take them over entirely. Conflict detection, separation management, trajectory optimisation: all of these moves to automated systems. The scale and complexity of future airspace will exceed human capability. These systems, it states, cannot rely on human fallback because the performance required surpasses human capacity.
Controllers will not disappear in this future. They transition into what the CATS CONOPS calls Strategic Airspace Managers – focused on system-wide performance, traffic flow optimisation and the oversight of automation itself.
The tactical skills a controller spends years developing are precisely the skills automation is designed to replace. The new role requires strategic thinking, the ability to interrogate automated decisions and the judgement to intervene when systems reach their limits.
The training path that produces an experienced controller today – repetitive tactical work, building instinct through volume – was designed for a role that is being redesigned. The question is whether the industry is training people for the job that exists now, or the one that is coming.
Other industries have faced versions of this question. The gaming industry has developed immersive simulations and adaptive training systems that compress experience and expose learners to rare, high-stakes scenarios in controlled environments. Healthcare has built systematic approaches to learning from events that cannot be allowed to happen repeatedly in practice. These are working models aviation can draw on. Training environments for ATCOs and ATSEPs are one of the few spaces in ATM where new technologies can be tested without affecting live operations – making them a natural starting point.
The future airspace will be more complex on every dimension. Passenger air traffic is projected to more than double by 2043, while drones, urban air mobility and commercial space operations add entirely new layers of traffic and coordination. The Strategic Airspace Managers of the future will need to navigate all of this – and that places greater demand on a different kind of experience: not the tactical fluency of today's controllers, but the strategic judgement, systems thinking and automation literacy the next generation will need to develop.
The industry cannot assume that experience will build itself. It has to decide, deliberately, what experience it is building towards.
Retention
For most ANSPs, long-term retention is not the defining challenge it can be in other industries. Controllers and ATSEPs frequently spend their careers within the same organisation. The risk is not that people leave – it is that they leave during the wrong period, before the investment in them has compounded into genuine capability.
That risk is heightened by the transition the previous section describes. Developing strategic judgement, automation literacy and the ability to manage complex systems takes time – arguably as much time as the tactical expertise it is replacing. The period immediately following qualification is not just financially critical. It is when a professional either builds the foundation of a new kind of expertise, or doesn't.
Environments where learning continues beyond initial qualification, where experienced professionals mentor rather than simply supervise, and where new entrants are given space to develop strategic thinking rather than just execute procedures – these are what convert a newly qualified controller into a future Strategic Airspace Manager. Retention is a capacity and resilience metric. In a period of fundamental role transition, it is also a readiness metric.
Conclusion
The people Tomorrow's Voices is reaching today - students and early-career professionals who have not yet encountered air traffic management - will be among the first generation to work in the system the CATS CONOPS describes. They will not spend their careers building tactical reflexes through repetition. They will build strategic judgement, automation literacy and the capacity to make decisions that machines cannot. The industry is building the team that will run a different operation entirely.
Attracting the right people is the start. Training them well, structuring their experience deliberately for a changing role, and sustaining their development long enough for that expertise to compound and transfer - these are not separate HR concerns. They are the conditions that determine whether the transition to the future system succeeds or stalls.
Technology will transform aviation but people will determine whether that transformation succeeds.
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