Winning formula

AMPAP administrator Pierre Coutu, reflects on the launch, history and success of ACI-ICAO’s flagship airport management training programme.

The Airport Management Professional Accreditation Programme (AMPAP) is a joint ACI-ICAO initiative that offers a unique executive development curriculum to airport management professionals and stakeholders.

The programme covers all the functional areas of the airport business, promotes adherence to uniform industry standards and best-recommended practices, and engenders a broad cross-cultural learning environment.

Graduates receive the joint ACI-ICAO award of the International Airport Professional (IAP) or AMPAP Associate diploma and designation.

We recently passed the 13th anniversary of our 2007 pilot course at ICAO Headquarters, and I fondly remember those first 18 eager individuals who arrived from seven different countries spread across four continents.

That first group had already accurately signified a cross-section of the growing AMPAP community that is located today in 115 countries worldwide.

AMPAP courses focus on best practices in airport management along with ICAO standards and recommended practices, and policy guidance. Experienced, multi-disciplinary subject-matter experts with extensive international expertise, including AMPAP graduates, have conducted the gateway/entry mandatory courses in a classroom/face-to-face format over five days in about 60 cities worldwide to date, multiple times in the some of these cities.

The three other mandatory courses in the AMPAP curriculum have always been delivered in an interactive, combined virtual classroom and online format since 2007, requiring no travel displacements.

International interactive online learning component

Close to one hundred resource-persons have contributed to the development, updates, and delivery of AMPAP since our inception and we all feel privileged to have had an opportunity to contribute to this venture.

Those of us involved know it is comparable to a team sport in terms of how important it is to maintain our momentum and stay focused.

By these very tenets, in response to the challenges that arose from the COVID-19 spread, we instituted extraordinary measures that would allow eligible applicants who wanted to begin their own AMPAP journey to gain entry via any one of the online mandatory courses, when normally, new enrollees must start with the ‘gateway’ course that is delivered face-to-face only.

Since we launched the programme, the strength, quality and interactive design of the AMPAP online delivery platform has been tailored to the learning requirements of management-level personnel and it is this robust online feature we have employed that we are fervently counting on to continue today.

This agile response would effectively allow airport executives to stay safe while pursuing their competency building aspirations during these unprecedented, challenging times.

Exceptional quality professionals breaking down functional professional silos

Over time, and from interfacing first-hand with the professionals who engage in AMPAP, one common element that continues to stand out among them is their exceptional quality.

Consequentially, by allowing the programme to build on these foundational management personnel and augment the skillsets of the more experienced, their professional enhancement makes for better quality decision-making and actions that put them ahead of the game and stand them out among peers, locally, regionally and globally. They work to provide improved added value together.

The AMPAP experience has revealed that functional silos, such as the departmentalisation of airport managerial structures into semi-hermetic safety, security, operations, commercial and financial management units, form a serious impediment to the development of the ‘systemic’ competency of airport professionals, namely that we are an integral part of the air transportation system. This is a critical factor for airport enterprises to consider.

Clearly best practices cannot be disseminated effectively and solely through the transfer of knowledge. Experienced executives learn best through “discovery learning”, more specifically, “problem-based learning”, which accounts for more than half of the AMPAP curriculum.

Throughout we challenge participants with real-life problems that airport enterprises either encounter or anticipate; they are coached into confronting these issues while working in multi-disciplinary and multi-national teams. This would bring out divergent opinions that arise from a variety of functional and cultural perspectives juxtaposed with the added pressure of co-operating across time zones.

Indeed, it is a fastidious, yet decidedly enriching part of the programme. This sharpens effective leadership thinking and behaviour and with proper strategic guidance, these are the people who could contribute to the hard climb out of their airport’s post-COVID-19 recovery process.

Consolidating the airport management profession

The four strategic objectives for AMPAP that continue still stand: increase expertise; establish uniform standards; share expertise; and promote professional excellence.

Although the success of the Programme may be due primarily to the sharing of best practices, on another level, we have been inspired by the importance airport executives attribute to consolidating this complex, multi-dimensional airport management profession.

AMPAP is not just another vehicle for its participants to receive a nice‑to‑have diploma. Rather, they are enablers with a curiosity and enthusiasm for aviation who stand behind the best practices, procedures, applications and infrastructure that foster significant and innovative contributions within their airport enterprise, ultimately optimising and improving their organisational performance.

Africa has provided 13% of all AMPAP participants to date; Asia-Pacific 32%; Europe 12%; Latin America-Caribbean 9%; Middle East 15%; and North America 19%.

One emerging industry best practice relates to the development of a Competency Building Master Plan (CBMP) that is specific to each enterprise and constitutes an evolution of a ‘traditional’ comprehensive training plan.

A distinguishing feature of the CBMP relates training directly to performance as the return on investment (ROI), which leading airports espouse. Any airport can conduct a gap analysis from two types of criteria: the first would be to determine the specific strategic, tactical objectives of the enterprise and the second would, more importantly, involve benchmarking various elements against relevant industry standards and best practices.

The constant evolution of our industry’s best practices also necessitates regular and timely updates by teams of subject matter experts to the AMPAP material, particularly pertaining to business management, the strategic use of new technologies, operations performance optimisation, infrastructure planning, and commercial development.

The overall emphasis of the programme lies essentially in competency building that targets skills development within the airport leadership context such as foresight, decision-making, and ability to negotiate with stakeholders, which go hand in hand with knowledge acquisition.

Confronting the challenges

AMPAP has proven its value to hundreds of participants while weathering the global economic recession in the late 2000s and we humbly believe it will do so again now, and in the post-COVID-19 period.

Plans have been disrupted for everyone. In the unprecedented times that have been forced upon us, the AMPAP team has found continuity in remaining focused on the positive and by continuing to be productive with what we can still do.

For us, this has meant occupying our time by maintaining the scheduled online AMPAP mandatory courses. What better way and use of their time for airport executives, our current and future aviation leaders, to proactively continue to build on their own competencies, through AMPAP.

We would like to believe that in some ways AMPAP triggered the beginning of a new generation of airport executives. In fact, numerous graduates refer to their journey through the programme courses as enabling and game-changing.

We are tirelessly committed to doing better on other fronts as well: by working to increase gender participation of women beyond the current 25% intake; to make the programme more universally available to participants from least developed countries (LDCs); and for AMPAP to become an integral part of the competency building master plans in airport enterprises worldwide.

In 115 countries, hundreds of airport organisations have been paying attention.