Area9 Lyceum Blog

Unconscious incompetence is one of the most prevalent and damaging problems facing the aviation workforce. Ever heard the saying, “You don’t know that you don’t know”? In a nutshell, that’s what unconscious incompetence is, and its effects on job performance are pervasive.

Pilots and flight instructors have different objectives for different jobs and require different content to be trained effectively. While traditional e-learning programs may struggle to handle different needs, Area9’s biological model makes it easy to train for different skill and experience levels, as well as for different but related roles.

Safety in the sky depends on your pilots updating their skills and refreshing their training periodically. 

Aviation industry training depends on data collection to demonstrate that training happened and that it was successful. While AQP does collect data on participants, it typically relies on a pass/fail metric that does not differentiate between a trainee who demonstrates mastery and one who barely passes.

Which is preferable? Training that treats every pilot the same, regardless of knowledge and experience level? Or one that personalizes the learning and adjusts to each pilot based on what they need? 

Onboarding a commercial pilot takes a long time: at least 2 months training with the airline. While time spent onboarding new pilots is crucial from a safety and compliance perspective, it also means fewer qualified pilots available to fly at any given time — and that’s a problem.

Despite advancements in technology, traditional challenges in pilot training persist:

The implementation of the Advanced Qualification Program (AQP) in 1990 changed aviation industry training for the better. With its emphasis on company-specific, innovative, and flexible training, and its data collection capacity for auditing purposes, AQP is a more creative and effective approach to aviation industry training than more traditional methods. And the results show that it works: there are fewer fatal airline accidents now than in the past — 2017 was a benchmark year for airliner safety.

While more concerned with cognitive and interpersonal skills than technical knowledge, Crew Resource Management (CRM) training aims to help flight crews respond appropriately to the situations they find themselves in. With an emphasis on teamwork, problem solving, and communication, it may seem counter intuitive to train these types of “soft skills” through an e-learning platform, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. 

Compliance training is not popular: most people find it to be the most painful form of corporate training. It is usually a recurring requirement and employees know they’ll have to retrain at again and again. In this post we’ll focus mostly on health and safety, but the same problems with traditional e-learning affect all forms of compliance training.

What is a major problem plaguing the world of professional sales training? It’s the time training takes.

A 2016 survey found that American companies had an average turnover rate of 17.8%. But the survey also found that 69% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for at least three years if they experience a positive onboarding process. Even if you exclude high-turnover industries like retail and hospitality, that’s still an extremely high overall turnover rate.