2025 Agenda

Across the world, many ANSPs are facing the same pressure: training and certifying enough operational ATCOs to meet demand – without compromising quality, safety, or consistency. Capacity constraints, instructor availability, varying success rates, and growing complexity in operations all make the question urgent: how do we scale training effectively, and how do we know our training systems are truly working?
We shall explore what’s changing – and what still remains stubbornly human – when we move toward Competency-Based Training and Assessment (CBTA). We will discuss what CBTA is, why and when it is being introduced, and what it aims to solve. But more importantly, we’ll focus on the practical reality: how instructors actually evaluate trainees, how decisions are made in high-stakes environments, and how training documentation and assessment models can either support, or unintentionally distort, those decisions.
PANSA has been developing a Data-Driven Training approach and found that some long-held assumptions about assessment and instructor judgement don’t always match real training behaviour. This raised a bigger question we want to explore openly with the industry: are other training organizations seeing similar patterns, and how can we learn from one another across regions and cultures?
Key discussion angles include:
• CBTA in practice: What changes when an organization moves from traditional assessment to CBTA and what must change beyond templates and terminology?
• Culture and region specificity: Which parts of trainee development and instructor judgement are universal, and which are shaped by local context?
• Assessment design that drives quality: How should training reports / session forms be structured to capture deep, actionable instructor feedback and provide a reliable picture of trainee capability?
• From hundreds of sessions to better decisions: How can we use large volumes of training data to improve consistency, identify risks earlier, and support both trainees and instructors – especially when throughput is a strategic challenge?