Aerospace Dossier: Where are Italy's aerospace engineers? Mapping a rare talent.

There's a paradox at the heart of Italian aerospace: never so many orders, never so hard to find the people to turn them into product.

The demand figures are public. In its 2026–2030 industrial plan, Leonardo announced a campaign of 28,000 hires that will take the group from 62,700 to roughly 75,500 employees. Thales expects 9,000 new hires in 2026 globally, of which around 290 in Italy across Thales Italia and Thales Alenia Space, with 40% destined for engineering. And the supply chain, 80% of it small and medium firms, hires in cascade, because every prime contractor's programme breaks down into hundreds of orders for suppliers of aerostructures, avionics, equipment and testing.

The problem isn't demand. It's supply. Anyone looking for a systems engineer with certification experience today knows the search is measured in months. This dossier is a map to navigate it: where the talent is concentrated, who trains it, which roles are truly missing.

The geography: five hubs, five characters

Italian aerospace counts about 40,000 direct employees in aeronautics, concentrated in five main clusters, the same ones that gave rise to the National Aerospace Technology Cluster.

Piedmont, the hub of complex systems. Turin is the densest cluster: around 18,000 employees across 150 companies and €4.2 billion in regional revenue. Here aircraft (Leonardo), propulsion (Avio Aero, 5,200 people in Turin and expected revenue of €2.1 billion in 2026) and space (Thales Alenia Space, with modules flying on the ISS) coexist. The cluster forecasts 8% employment growth by the end of 2026, which, in practice, means every company is fishing in the same Politecnico di Torino pool at the same time.

Lombardy, rotary wings and aerostructures. The Varese–Milan axis is Italy's helicopter capital (Leonardo Helicopters between Cascina Costa and Vergiate) and its training capital (Aermacchi in Venegono). Training pool: Politecnico di Milano, which on its own produces a significant share of Italy's aerospace engineers. It's also the hub most exposed to cross-sector competition: automotive, automation and general mechanics draw on the same mechanical and systems profiles.

Campania, the aeronautical ecosystem. Pomigliano and the DAC district: aerostructures, maintenance, a supply chain of SMEs grown around Leonardo, and a school, Federico II, with a solid aeronautical tradition. The challenge here isn't training talent: it's keeping it, because migration north and abroad remains significant. For northern companies this is a concrete recruiting opportunity; for Campanian ones, an urgent question of internal technical careers.

Apulia, the aerostructures that export. Grottaglie (the fuselages of the Boeing 787) and Foggia: advanced composite manufacturing, a specific know-how that exists in few other places in Europe. Highly specialised profiles and, precisely for that reason, extremely hard to replace.

Lazio, institutional space. Rome and its surroundings concentrate space and defence: Thales Alenia Space, Avio in Colleferro (the Vega launchers), ESA in Frascati, ASI, plus defence electronics. La Sapienza feeds the pool. It's the hub where demand for software, systems and cybersecurity engineers grows fastest, in direct competition with the pure IT sector, which often pays more.

The roles that stall programmes

Talking to companies in the sector, the searches that get stuck are almost always the same:

The systems engineer. The figure who holds together requirements, architecture and verification. It takes years of exposure to complex programmes to train one, and every new programme requires whole teams of them. It's the supply chain's number-one bottleneck.

Certification and quality profiles. Airworthiness, EASA Part 21, space qualification: skills you don't learn at university but only in the field, and that the generation who holds them is, literally, retiring.

The real avionics engineer. Between embedded firmware and the integration of certified avionics systems (DO-178C, DO-254) there's an ocean. The latter number, in Italy, in the low hundreds.

The software engineer who'll take aerospace. The sector competes with IT for the same graduates, often with lower pay and slower processes. It wins when it sells what IT doesn't have: the tangibility of a product that flies.

What it means for those hiring

Three practical consequences, from our experience in the field:

Speed is a strategy, not a detail. With five clusters hiring in parallel, a three-month selection process is effectively a withdrawal. The best candidates have multiple offers: those who decide in two weeks land them, those who call a third interview "just to be sure" lose them.

The pool is national, not local. Mobility within the supply chain exists, especially from south to north, but it has to be built: real relocation, not a symbolic reimbursement. And in some cases it pays to look across borders: the axis with the Netherlands and Germany works both ways, and we see it every week between Milan and Eindhoven.

Rare profiles are discovered, not selected. The certification engineer with fifteen years of experience doesn't answer ads: they're working, and already in demand. You reach them through a direct search, run by someone who speaks their technical language and can tell them about a project, not a job description.

Italian aerospace talent exists, and it's among the best in Europe. There just isn't enough for everyone. The difference will be made by those who know how to look for it.

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Sources: Leonardo, 2026–2030 industrial plan (Lavoro Facile) · Thales, 9,000 hires in 2026 (Analisi Difesa) · Turin aerospace cluster and talent gap (KiTalent) · Talent for space (Agenda Digitale) · Italy's space supply chain across regions (Il Bo Live).

Labora Partners works in aerospace & defence recruiting from Milan and Eindhoven. Got a search that's stalled? Let's talk.