TUSAŞ Engine Industries

With the defence and aerospace sectors experiencing unprecedented transformation – rapid technological evolution, increasing complexity, supply chain volatility and an ageing technical workforce – TUSAŞ Engine Industries (TEI) recognised the urgent need for a proactive, data-driven and strategic approach to workforce planning that aligned future talent capabilities with long-term business strategy.

Traditional headcount-based planning could no longer meet the evolving needs of a project-based, highly specialised workforce, so TEI, a company established in 1985 as a joint venture of Turkish Aerospace Industries, General Electric, Turkish Armed Forces Foundation and the Turkish Aeronautical Association, launched ‘Yetenek 2.0’, a next-generation strategic workforce planning project anchored in the first-time equivalent methodology. This methodology modelled workforce needs based on actual work performed, not static roles. 

The project began with a robust analysis of TEI’s workforce using evidence-based practice and people analytics, and then a comprehensive diagnostic phase involving 30+ leadership interviews, in-depth analysis of 1,000+ workflows and end-to-end activity mapping. It was a was a cross-functional, co-creation process that saw multidisciplinary teams – blending HR, engineering, operations and quality leads – design, simulate and validate workforce scenarios. 

Function leaders became co-creators, not just recipients, of the workforce strategy, and these teams collaborated in real time to integrate automation, lean redesign and emerging capability needs, ensuring that the strategy was embedded both operationally and culturally.

TEI equipped internal change agents and functional leaders with communication toolkits to cascade the initiative’s goals, and a series of workshops, meetings and people surveys reinforced alignment, transparency and engagement at every level. Structured learning modules supported employee transitions into newly designed roles. Ultimately, TEI says Yetenek 2.0 “embedded talent management into the fabric of how the organisation operates, competes and evolves”. 

TEI achieved its 2024 business targets using only 97 per cent of planned workforce capacity, resulting in a 3 per cent productivity gain, absenteeism rates fell from 2.1 per cent to 1.47 per cent and the introduction of robotic process automation led to a drop in error rates, from 7.2 per cent to 0.4 per cent, while departmental performance scores improved from 74 to 82 year on year (2023-24).

The PMAs judges were impressed by the execution of a “very complex piece of work” at such a large scale, and the evident impact it has had on workforce planning, productivity, employee experience, job design and wellbeing across the organisation.