Aviation spans the vehicles that carry people and cargo through controlled airspace: commercial aircraft built against thousand-unit backlogs, military aircraft kept airworthy for decades, general aviation, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and the emerging electric and hybrid classes. The commercial core is running at full stretch. Airbus delivered 793 commercial aircraft in 2025 against a record backlog of 8,754 . Boeing delivered 600 the same year and won FAA approval to raise 737 MAX production from 38 to 42 per month, its first rate increase since the January 2024 door plug incident .
Hiring challenges in aviation
Commercial aircraft backlogs that stretch past a decade
Airbus closed 2025 with 8,754 aircraft on order, including a widebody record of 1,124, and Boeing booked 1,173 net orders against 600 deliveries, its best output since 2018 . Both order books now represent roughly a decade of production at current rates. The engineering consequence is rate. Programs hire for ramps, not for design: production engineers, rate-readiness specialists, and supplier quality people who can hold a line while it accelerates. The constraints that bind are equally instructive, because the Pratt and Whitney geared turbofan shortage left Airbus with finished aircraft waiting on engines, and the fuselage panel quality escape cost the company its original delivery target . Engineers who have lived a ramp and a supply crisis are the scarce profile, and most of them are not on the market. Rate increases also shift the internal labor market: every aircraft that moves faster through the line pulls quality, liaison, and test engineering along with it, so a single rate step can absorb a department's bench for a year.
Military aircraft where sustainment outlasts the production line
Military aircraft careers run the other direction from commercial ones. Boeing's P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol fleet is built on the 737 NG airframe, a design whose commercial production ended years ago, yet the defense line continues to take new deliveries . That pattern generalizes: certified baselines fly for decades while the engineering work becomes fatigue tracking, structural life extension, avionics refresh, and mission system integration against changing threats. The population sits inside primes and government depots, and security clearance and export-control eligibility filter it further. Programs that staff military aircraft work from commercial hiring habits discover how much of the job is configuration control across a thirty-year baseline, and how little of that transfers from a clean-sheet program.
Advanced air mobility where certification is the product
The FAA published its powered-lift operating rule in October 2024, giving advanced air mobility aircraft a certification and operating path inside the national airspace system . Joby's program shows what that path costs: five stages of type certification, Type Inspection Authorization as the final phase, aircraft built to FAA-conforming drawings and approved test plans, and for-credit flight testing flown by the agency's own pilots . The workforce this creates is a certification workforce: means-of-compliance authors, designated representative liaisons, conformity inspectors. Every eVTOL company is walking the same stages at once, and the people who have completed the walk can be counted in hundreds, not thousands .
Electric aviation where the battery is a certified system
EASA's special condition for electric and hybrid propulsion treats the propulsion battery as flight hardware: it must deliver rated power throughout the flight, absorb regenerated energy or dissipate it without hazard, and manage state of charge and state of health as certified parameters . The first fully electric aircraft type certificate went to Pipistrel in June 2020, completed in under three years . Electric aviation hiring therefore splits by evidence type. Battery system engineers own thermal runaway containment and cell management; electric machine engineers own motors, inverters, and cooling; and certification engineers turn both into compliance data that a regulator will accept . The three rarely inhabit one CV.
Hybrid-electric aircraft that retrofit the regional fleet
NASA's Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration has GE Aerospace modifying a Saab 340B with a parallel hybrid system alongside its CT7 turboprops, and magniX replacing a de Havilland Dash 7's two outboard PT6A engines with magni650 electric propulsion units . The megawatt-class powertrains were exercised at altitude conditions at NASA's NEAT facility before flight. The project's real product is certification evidence: ground and flight test data that informs means of compliance for hybrid-electric aircraft, with influence across more than 35 aviation standards . The people who can deliver this combine power electronics, thermal management, and battery integration with an instinct for what a certification plan will accept, a combination the industry is still inventing.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) move from waivers to a rulebook
The FAA's August 2025 proposed rule would create part 108, performance-based regulations for beyond visual line of sight operations: airworthiness acceptance against industry consensus standards, operator permits and certificates, and UAS Traffic Management services as regulated infrastructure . Until now, BVLOS work ran on individual waivers and exemptions, and the engineering was negotiation. Under the proposed framework, detect-and-avoid, right-of-way logic against ADS-B traffic, and ground risk management become requirements that designs must meet . Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) engineering is therefore splitting from hobby-grade work into a certifiable discipline, and the engineers who can design to a performance-based rule sit in a narrow overlap between drone companies and certified aircraft programs.
General aviation feeds the bench every segment hires from
General aviation is the industry's intake pipe. The Pipistrel certification showed what light aircraft programs produce: whole-aircraft engineers who have carried a small certified platform through structure, systems, and flight test under a regulator's supervision . GA and business aviation sustain hundreds of smaller programs whose engineers move up into commercial, defense, and advanced air mobility roles as the market pulls them. General aviation hiring is worth doing deliberately even where the fleet is small, because airworthiness judgement is cheaper to grow on a light aircraft than on a widebody, and the industry's next senior systems engineers are being trained there now.
Commercial aircraft certification claims a finding log can test
Aviation CVs share vocabulary even when the experience behind it differs by an order of magnitude. Everyone has supported a certification program; few have held requirements through conformity, authored the test plans, and answered the findings. The probes are concrete: which requirement did the candidate own through its compliance cycle, what did the designated representatives find, and which finding did the candidate close with data . The cost of a miss runs in schedule. Type certification timelines are measured in years, and every rework cycle resets findings that a stronger hire would never have generated. The hiring implication is worth stating once: in aviation, the candidate who has already defended a compliance finding in front of a regulator is worth more than one who has flown the aircraft.
References
- Airbus reports 793 commercial aircraft deliveries in 2025 — Airbus. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- Boeing beats Airbus on orders, still behind on production — The Seattle Times. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- Advanced Air Mobility: Air Taxis — Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). (accessed 2026-09-28)
- Joby's First Conforming Aircraft Heads to Final Assembly in Preparation for TIA Flight Testing — Joby Aviation. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- SC E-19: Special Condition for Electric and Hybrid Propulsion Systems (EHPS) — European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). (accessed 2026-09-28)
- EASA's Type Certification of a Fully Electric Aircraft — European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). (accessed 2026-09-28)
- Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration (EPFD) Project Executive Summary — NASA. (accessed 2026-09-28)
- Normalizing Unmanned Aircraft Systems Beyond Visual Line of Sight Operations (NPRM) — Federal Register / FAA. (accessed 2026-09-28)