What This Year’s Show Told Us About Aerospace and Defense Talent

By Marika Akers, Practice Leader, Silvester & Company

The Farnborough International Airshow of 2026 was the largest edition in the show’s 78-year history. A sixth exhibition hall went up after an early sell-out, and pavilions from more than two dozen countries filled the floor, India to Brazil. The headlines were predictable: record order books, bigger defense budgets, and a space sector that investors have finally started taking seriously.

We have been walking these halls, in Farnborough and in Paris, for more than 10 years, and working in A&D for over 25. Long enough to remember when our firm was the only search partner at the show. That is no longer true. More people, more companies, more service providers, and more private equity and venture capital every year. Deal volume was not dramatic on the commercial side, but it was still positive. Defense grew disproportionately. Roughly half the show’s record 1,600 exhibitors represented defense related technology, and the eVTOL demonstrations from Beta, Joby, and Vertical drew some of the biggest crowds.

Spend five days walking through those halls, talking to the people who build these programs, and a quieter story surfaces. It does not show up in the order backlog, but it will decide whether any of that backlog gets delivered. Someone has to lead this work, and they need strong teams to deliver it. We have been watching a talent shortage build for years, but the gap has widened dramatically.

While the shortage is not new, the tone of the discussion has shifted significantly. It is now the top issue and biggest risk companies face.

The numbers are not subtle

Industry-wide attrition in aerospace and defense held near 15 percent in 2024, more than double the average across other U.S. industries, according to the AIA and McKinsey workforce study covering more than 600,000 employees. A retirement wave is expected to take roughly a quarter of the current workforce out within the decade, and separate estimates put the engineering shortfall well into the hundreds of thousands of roles by 2030.

Demand is not slowing to meet that supply. Airbus and Boeing together are carrying a combined backlog north of 14,000 commercial aircraft, close to a decade of production at current rates. Commercial aircraft, defense manufacturing, space, cyber, and maintenance and repair are all expanding at once, and all of them draw from the same finite pool of engineers, machinists, technicians, and cleared professionals.

Important to note: these are not five separate talent markets competing for headcount. They are one market, fractured across sectors that used to be able to somewhat ignore each other and now cannot.

The same shortage, underwritten by different governments

That fractured, one-market dynamic is not only playing out inside the U.S. It is bigger and more urgent in places building their defense base from closer to scratch.

Europe’s defense turnover crossed roughly ~290 billion in 2024, up more than 10 percent from the year before, and industry groups now put the shortfall across the European defense industrial base somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 skilled workers, a gap expected to widen through the early 2030s even as job postings already run more than 40 percent above pre-war levels. The European Union has responded with a continent-wide plan to train and retrain 600,000 workers by 2030, layered on top of a broader technology talent gap McKinsey has estimated at nearly 4 million people across the EU by 2027.

Canada has moved just as fast on the policy side. Its first Defence Industrial Strategy, launched in February 2026, commits billions toward building domestic capability under a build-partner-buy framework, with a stated goal of adding well over 100,000 new jobs by the mid-2030s. Ottawa knows it cannot staff that ambition from its existing labor pool. The strategy leans explicitly on a new Canada Defence Skills Agenda built around training pipelines and immigration pathways, and this year’s immigration categories were expanded specifically to prioritize skilled workers in aerospace and transport trades, pilots, aircraft mechanics, and inspectors among them, even as the government has been tightening immigration more broadly elsewhere.

That turns the fractured market we described above from a domestic story into an international one. The same engineers, program leaders, and operators being pulled between commercial, defense, and space work in the U.S. are also being pulled between the U.S., Europe, and Canada, each standing up its own version of the same buildout on its own timeline, and each discovering the people do not yet exist in sufficient numbers to fill it.

The leadership bandwidth constraint

Most of the talent conversation at this year’s show, and most of the coverage since, has focused on the engineer shortage: not enough young people entering the field, AI and tech companies pulling graduates away from Boeing and Airbus, a pipeline problem that STEM outreach and apprenticeships are supposed to fix over time.

That is real, and it matters. But it is not the constraint our firm spends most of its time on. The harder problem sits a few levels up. We recently completed a search for a Vice President role at a roughly $1 billion defense manufacturer, to lead a business unit through a multi-year production ramp, more than doubling output while absorbing new equipment, a larger workforce, and tighter customer delivery schedules all at once. The technical requirements of that role were the easy part to screen for. The real question, the one that took most of our diligence, was whether a given candidate had the ability to lead an organization through that kind of growth strain successfully.

That is the shortage nobody is counting. You can eventually train or hire your way to more engineers. It is much harder to train your way to more defense-experienced leaders who have personally run a facility through a 2 to 3x production ramp without the organization breaking underneath them. That capability is rare, and it is not evenly distributed across the industry.

Boards, PE investors, and executive teams need to be prepared to compete on story, culture, and compensation, not just title and scope. More than that, they need partners who can help find and assess non-traditional candidates, people who may come from other sectors, other geographies, or a different level of experience than the job description originally called for. Partners must deeply understand the industry, your challenges, and exercise the creativity, judgement, and assessment process to open up the pool of potential candidates beyond what you may have imagined on your own.

Why the lines are disappearing

Underneath the workforce story is a shift in where the boundaries sit. The deal data shows it first. Capital is concentrating around software-enabled, dual-use, and space-based businesses, while companies tied to a single sector face growing valuation pressure.

The talent version of that story is probably the bigger one. When a satellite designed for consumer broadband can double as tactical military connectivity, and a launch vehicle built for commercial payloads can carry national security spacecraft, the skills on both sides of that line start to converge. Space is the clearest case. It reached durable, fundable growth by designing for dual use from the start rather than treating it as an afterthought.

We have watched this convergence happen inside our own firm as much as across the industry. Our A&D practice was built over 25 years. Earlier this year, we combined with a partner group whose background sits in private equity backed C-suite leadership across technology and industrials. Neither of us set out to blend those two worlds for the sake of it. We did it because the searches we were each fielding had already started to overlap and we can be the bridge for talent between them.


What it all means for hiring

Across every search we are running right now, three competencies keep coming up as the actual scarce resource, more than any single technical skill.

Leaders who can be bridge builders, carrying A&D from its legacy pace into a faster, more competitive era. New entrants, faster funding cycles, and technology that turns over every product cycle are colliding with programs built for a slower, more insulated world. The leaders who matter most now are not the ones defending how it has always been done. They are the ones who protect the discipline that still works, safety, quality, program rigor, while rebuilding the speed the moment demands.

Leaders who have been tested by strain, not just present for growth. Anyone can hold a title while a business is stable. Far fewer have personally run an organization through a 2 to 3x production ramp, a workforce doubling, or a supply chain under real pressure, and come out the other side intact.

Leaders who can move, and adapt, across sectors, geographies, and technologies – quickly. The executives worth the most right now are not the deepest specialists in one lane. They are the ones who have proven they can walk into an unfamiliar sector, a new regulatory regime, or a business being remade by AI, and make high-impact decisions quickly – and sometimes without a lot of data. Think of the F16 Fighter Pilot instead of the Aircraft Carrier Commander.

Leaders who can win the talent war by building a culture people choose to stay in. With engineers and cleared professionals in short supply everywhere at once, the companies pulling ahead are not simply outbidding on salary. They are led by people who know how to build a place good people do not want to leave, which matters more than ever when your best engineer has a competing offer from an AI lab, a rival prime, and a government across an ocean, all in the same week.

The order books will get the attention this year, and they deserve it. But every number in them assumes people and leaders who can deliver, and right now that is the binding constraint, not the budget. For anyone hiring into this industry, that is the brief to plan around, starting now.