Hrm Diversity in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Community

HRM DIVERSITY UAV COMMUNITY

HRM Diversity in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Community

Kevin B. O’Keefe

Embry Riddle Aeronautical University

Table of Content

Abstract

HRM Diversity in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Industry

Diversity in the workforce is commonly thought of as individual differences between employees in an organization. While that is accurate, it is so much more than that! Diversity is about empowering all of the people and capitalizing on all the strengths of each employee. The demographics or differences of these individuals are usually age, race, ethnicity, gender, education, or their background. Age diversity provides a very good examples of how diversity can be seen in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) community. In a given situation, there may be an UAV pilot that is close to retirement working with another pilot that is just barely out of high school. Both of these pilots may be relatively new to the UAV industry. The younger pilot is probably a technically sharp individual, as that would be a requirement for an inexperienced operator entering into this industry. The older pilot probably has a lot of aviation experience that has led him or her to the UAV industry. Quite often the younger pilot will be very computer literate and wonder why the older pilot struggles with the computer interface used to operate the aircraft; come on this is no different then playing one of those on line role play games (i.e. rpg’s). The older pilot may wonder why this younger pilot doesn’t thing to check with air traffic control before commanding his aircraft to descend in altitude ; come on this is no different then flying a manned aircraft you need to make sure there isn’t another aircraft approaching. Both of these pilots bring contribute strengths that are required in the industry and both see each other as being particular weak in a certain skill set that is part of the bigger picture.

The unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) industry is very...