Airbus will recruit at least 6,000 people to face the energy recovery and transition

This is a double challenge facing all industrial sectors: ensuring the recovery of activity after the Covid-19 pandemic and working to combine this recovery as well as possible with the imperatives of the energy transition. In other words, take advantage of the situation to prepare for responsible growth today. For Airbus, the objective is to meet the need for new aircraft that companies are ordering, while preparing the aircraft of tomorrow: less energy-consuming, more virtuous and emitting less CO2. For this, the European aircraft manufacturer announced on Wednesday January 19 that it intends to recruit at least 6,000 people in 2022.

Aircraft production is a long cycle that involves many players, from the foundry of engine parts to the final assembly of the aircraft, with numerous subcontractors. Giving visibility to this value chain is crucial, even if air traffic will still take many months to return to its pre-crisis level of 2019. Airbus boss Guillaume Faury had already sent a few messages in this direction in the spring of 2021. The group is getting down to business at the start of 2022.

At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, Airbus announced the elimination of 15,000 positions out of the 135,000 employees then employed by the group. The figure was finally revised downwards thanks in particular to the public aid put in place by the various European States. In the end, the number of group employees fell from 135,000 at the end of 2019 to 126,000. The 6,000 recruitments planned for this year are only the beginning.

A quarter of planned recruitments will call for new knowledge, related to decarbonisation, digital transformation and cyber-technology. Airbus is studying in particular the development by 2036 of a hydrogen-powered aircraft, which involves a thorough review of the architecture of the aircraft, with new professions at the key and therefore the need for new training to meet all these challenges.