It is the single most common misunderstanding in aviation maintenance hiring, and it costs both sides. Technicians rule themselves out of careers they are qualified for. Employers search a talent pool far smaller than the one they are actually allowed to hire from.
Under 14 CFR 145.157(a), a repair station located in the United States must ensure that each person it authorises to approve an article for return to service is appropriately certificated under Part 65, as a mechanic or as a repairman.
Read that again, because the wording is doing something specific. The requirement is attached to the person who signs the work off. It is not a requirement that every person in the building hold a certificate.
The repair station itself holds the certificate. The approval for return to service is made under the repair station's certificate, by a person the station has authorised, working inside the station's approved procedures. That is a different structure from a lone mechanic signing in their own name, and it is why repair stations can staff work differently to a line operation.
So the real question for a shop is not "does this person have an A&P". It is "who is authorised to approve this article, and is everyone else working inside procedures under that authority".
Part 65 contains two paths, not one. Everybody knows the mechanic certificate. Far fewer people know the repairman certificate, and its requirements are structurally different in ways that matter enormously to early-career talent.
That last point is the honest trade. An A&P is portable and a repairman certificate is not. But for someone trying to get into the industry, a route that starts with a job rather than with eighteen to thirty months of school is not a consolation prize. It is a completely different proposition.
If you have electronics, avionics, machining, composites, sheet metal, industrial controls, automotive electrical or military technical experience, component and bench work inside a repair station is closer to you than you think. The skills transfer. The regulatory door is not the wall you were told it was.
It also explains why so many repair station openings are support and bench roles rather than mechanic roles. Those seats are real careers, they pay, and they build documented experience.
The thing to do is not to assume. Ask the shop directly which roles require a certificate held by the individual and which operate under the station's authority. A shop that cannot answer that clearly tells you something useful about the shop.
Every Part 145 shop in your market is bidding for the same certificated people, and the bidding is being won by whoever pays most. That competition is avoidable on a meaningful share of your seats.
If a role does not require the person holding it to approve articles for return to service, the certificate question changes shape entirely. You can hire on aptitude, documentation discipline and whether the person holds up in your environment, then develop the certification path around them with the station as the sponsor.
That is also a retention mechanism, and a stronger one than a pay rise. A person whose route into the industry runs through your shop has a reason to stay that a competing offer has to beat rather than simply match.
None of this means certificates do not matter, and none of it is a workaround. What any individual may perform or approve is determined by federal regulation and by that repair station's approved procedures, which are specific to the station and its ratings.
Repairman eligibility runs through §65.101 and carries its own requirements. The privileges are limited to the employing station. The FAA legal interpretations that clarified §145.157 date from 2011 to 2013, so current guidance and your Flight Standards District Office are the authority, not a web page.
JetBridge is an aviation workforce company. We do not certify anyone, we do not make regulatory determinations, and nothing here is regulatory or legal advice. Verify requirements with the FAA and with the repair station's own approved procedures.
A government study of aviation maintenance schools found the most frequently cited barrier to attracting young people was not pay and not difficulty. It was that they did not know these careers existed. Students aim at airlines because airlines are visible, and have no idea that repair stations offer aviation careers that may not require individual certification at all.
That is an information failure, not a labor shortage, and it is fixable. JetBridge works the employer side of it: establishing which seats actually require what, carrying that back to schools and workforce partners as real demand, and matching people against the environment they will hold up in.
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