IATA pitches formal training-needs assessments as a fix for reactive, one-off staff training

IATA's Knowledge Hub has published a case for treating Training Needs Assessments (TNAs) as a strategic diagnostic step rather than a formality airlines skip in favour of jumping straight to a training course. It cites the 2025 Randstad Workmonitor finding that 23% of employees globally left a job over insufficient training, alongside a World Economic Forum survey in which 63% of employers named skills gaps as the single biggest barrier to business transformation, to argue that under-investment in properly diagnosing training needs carries a real retention cost. Drawing on 22 months of its own inquiry data, IATA Training says 73% of requests it receives are tied to strategic organisational initiatives rather than one-off skill gaps, with ground and cargo operations (49%) and safety/IOSA-related requests (30%) the largest categories by subject. The piece lays out a six-step assessment process — identifying the problem, defining the desired performance level, isolating the actual gap, determining root causes, exploring ways to close it, and only then making training recommendations — and illustrates it with a case study of an airline pursuing an aggressive growth strategy that was seeing high staff turnover; the underlying diagnosis turned out to be a lack of ongoing development opportunities rather than any single skills deficit. A second example covers IOSA implementation, where the assessment had to cover both general staff awareness and formal internal auditor certification as distinct training needs rather than a single blanket programme.