What kind of person does this aviation role need?

We invite you for a thoughtful discussion:

This is a non-commercial beta, forever free of charge. It is an experiment we published so that people who work in aviation HR can poke at it and tell us where it is wrong. It is not a finished product and it is not part of any commercial NeuroFrame service.

The numbers are model output, not measurements. No one has measured 305 aviation roles across five life-cycle stages. The ranges are generated by our own model from the structure of each role's published competency demands. They have not been validated against real job performance in any airline, airport, ANSP or MRO. They may be wrong.

Do not make a decision about a real person with this tool only. Not hiring, not rejecting, not promoting, not removing anyone from a duty, not deciding whether someone is fit for a safety-critical post.

It is not an assessment. Typing eight numbers into the compare panel does not assess anybody. It draws a line on a chart next to a made-up band and shows expectations with a certain degree of reasonability, which, to our knowledge, could increase the probability of success of a person in a role, but is not at all a guarantee of such success.

No warranty, and no liability. The tool is provided "as is" and "as available". We promise nothing about it and we accept no liability for what happens if you rely on it. The full wording is in the Terms of Use.

It will change without notice, and it may disappear. Do not build a process on top of it.

Nothing here is legal, medical, aeromedical or regulatory advice.

If you use it the way it is meant to be used — as a conversation starter about what a role actually demands, and as a way to tell us where our model does not match your experience — it costs nothing and it might be useful. Anything beyond that is on you.

The legal version. This box is the plain-language summary. The binding wording — warranty exclusion, limitation of liability, permitted and prohibited use, intellectual property, data and governing law — is in the Terms of Use, and those Terms govern if the two ever differ. The tool is published by Data Nexus Technologies Services FZ-LLC (RAKEZ Licence No. 17009226, Ras Al Khaimah, UAE), of which NeuroFrame is a product and trading brand. UAE law applies.

Neither ICAO nor IATA — nor EASA, the FAA, EUROCONTROL or any civil aviation authority — has reviewed, approved, validated, accredited or endorsed this tool, the behavioural ranges in it, or NeuroFrame's methodology. No such approval has been sought, and to our knowledge no process exists under which it could be granted: ICAO states in its own Personnel Licensing guidance that it does not endorse, recognise or approve training organisations or programmes, and neither body operates a certification scheme for assessment instruments of this kind.

ICAO Annexes and Docs, IATA manuals and programmes, and EASA and FAA implementing rules are cited here for one purpose only: to identify each role and to describe the competency demands those instruments place on it. Citation is not affiliation. Where a role's card says "Defined by ICAO Annex 1 §4.2", that means Annex 1 creates the licence — not that ICAO has any view on the numbers we have printed next to it.

All titles, document numbers and marks — ICAO, IATA, IGOM, AHM, ISAGO, IOSA, DGR, CEIV, EASA, EUROCONTROL and others — belong to their respective owners and are used for identification and reference only. Source documents are not reproduced here; consult the official publications for authoritative text. Full wording: Terms of Use, section 10.

The authority to decide whether any person may hold a licence, rating, certificate, authorisation or nominated post rests solely with the competent authority and with the operator's own approved procedures. This page has no standing in that process whatsoever.

The five stages used here come from the corporate life-cycle model set out by Ichak Adizes in Corporate Lifecycles (1988) and Managing Corporate Lifecycles (1999), and from a number of similar studies. It is a practitioner framework developed out of consulting practice. It is widely known, it is a genuinely useful way to talk about how organisations age — and it is worth being clear about what it is not.

It is not an empirically validated measurement instrument. There is no established, peer-reviewed procedure for determining which stage an organisation is in, no published reliability data for such a determination, and no agreed evidence base linking a stage to specific behavioural requirements. Treat the stage as a lens, not a diagnosis. The life-cycle stage is yours to choose — the tool does not determine it and cannot check it.

It is one of several competing models, none of which commands consensus in organisational research. Others include Greiner's growth-and-crisis phases (1972), Churchill and Lewis's small-business stages (1983), Quinn and Cameron's effectiveness-criteria model (1983) and Miller and Friesen's life-cycle work (1984). They divide the same territory differently and would not always place a given company in the same place.

Stage assignment is subjective. Two people at the same airline will often disagree about whether it is in Stability or Aristocracy — and large organisations are frequently in different stages in different functions at the same time. An engineering division can be bureaucratic while the network team is in Prime.

We have adapted it. We use only the five late stages and we override the model wherever it conflicts with aviation reality — most importantly through the safety floor, which prevents the ageing curve from ever lowering the reliability demanded of a safety-critical role. That adaptation is ours, not the model's.

How to use it here: if a stage feels wrong for your organisation, do not force the choice. Look at two adjacent stages and read the difference between them — the direction of change is more informative than any single band. And if the model does not fit your organisation at all, the role's competency demands in the "What the standard asks of the person" card are drawn from published aviation instruments and stand on their own.

Attribution. "Adizes", "Adizes Institute", the Adizes corporate life-cycle model and related names and marks are the property of Dr Ichak Adizes and/or the Adizes Institute. They are named here only to identify accurately the framework this page discusses and adapts, and to credit its author — nominative and descriptive use. No protected expression from any Adizes work is reproduced; the stage descriptions, the eight-parameter mapping, the safety floor and every number on this page are our own original work.

Data Nexus and NeuroFrame are not affiliated with, licensed by, certified by or endorsed by Dr Ichak Adizes or the Adizes Institute. This adaptation is not their work and they bear no responsibility for it. The full basis on which the reference is made is set out in the Terms of Use, section 12. If you are a rights holder and consider that any element here exceeds fair use or nominative use, write to [email protected] and we will amend or remove it promptly.

The ranges describe how people tend to behave in a role. They say nothing about whether a person holds, or is eligible for, the licence, rating, type endorsement, medical certificate, language proficiency level, security background check or nominated-person acceptance that the role legally requires. Those are determined only by the competent authority and the operator's approved procedures, on evidence that has nothing to do with percentiles.

A candidate can sit perfectly inside every band on this page and still be legally unable to occupy the post. The reverse is equally true.

The compare panel runs entirely in your browser. Percentiles you enter are held in memory for the duration of the page and are not transmitted, stored or logged by this tool. Refreshing the page discards them.

That said: assessment percentiles about an identifiable person are personal data under the GDPR, the UAE PDPL and comparable regimes. If you enter data about someone else, you are the controller of it, not us. Be aware too that automated decision-making in recruitment carries specific obligations in several jurisdictions — including the EU AI Act, which classifies employment and worker-management systems as high-risk. None of that is a problem this page solves for you. See Terms of Use, sections 13 and 14.