RLC Aerospace Names Debbie Adams CPO Amid Talent Crunch
A great people chief is quietly worth as much to an aerospace firm as a great engineer.
RLC Aerospace has named Debbie Adams its Chief People Officer. She joins the British engineer, which has been making aerospace parts since 1955, to run its global people agenda across talent, leadership, culture and workforce transformation, supplying blades, airframes and ejection-seat components to military and civil programmes in the UK, US, Europe and Asia.
Debbie is, by her own account, a people-first operator, having named her consultancy People First Collective.
"Starting your own business is at times a scary prospect," she wrote on LinkedIn last year, "peppered with all that overflowing excitement and belief that you can make a difference."
Built for the talent war
In a 2025 study by the aerospace association AIA and McKinsey, 76% of companies said they were struggling to hire engineers and 56% were short of skilled trades.
ISG reckons aerospace and defence could be missing a million workers by 2030, as a wave of retirements walks decades of know-how out the door faster than newcomers walk in.
When the thing throttling growth is people rather than parts, the executive who can find, grow and keep them is worth as much as the one who designs the wing. RLC is betting Debbie is that executive.
President and Managing Director Kevan Donohoe welcomed Debbie to "the team" on LinkedIn, a small public signal that the role now sits at the table rather than below it.
Debbie spent almost a decade at GKN Aerospace, latterly as Vice President of HR, Talent and Engagement, building the leadership pipelines a global engineer runs on. Then she founded People First Collective, coaching leadership teams on culture, and her earlier stints through World Duty Free and LEGOLAND Windsor were multi-site operations that lived or died on hiring and keeping people.
She has, in short, spent a career doing exactly what aerospace is now desperate for.
By RLC's own account, her consulting work centres on values-led leadership and turning workforce insight into business outcomes. Put less politely: culture is a commercial lever, not a soft one.
Why a parts maker needs a people chief
RLC is not Boeing, and it does not pretend to be. It is a privately owned specialist that keeps the industry's supply chain flying, chasing the same scarce welders, machinists and systems engineers as the giants but without their brand, their budget or their pull.
For a firm that size, culture and reputation are the recruiting tools money cannot buy, and lately the only ones that reliably work.
In an industry long defined by what it can build, the sharper question in 2026 is who will build it, and who won't be poached before the next one. Debbie's job is to make an unshowy parts maker somewhere skilled people actively choose.
In aerospace right now, that may be the most valuable thing anyone can manufacture.
