Definition
Continuation training is the maintenance-world counterpart of recurrent training. A Part-66 aircraft maintenance licence does not expire on a short cycle, but the certification authorisation a Part-145 organisation issues to its certifying staff depends on the organisation keeping those people current — in the procedures they work to, in the regulation as it changes, and in the aircraft and technology they release.
The requirement sits at 145.A.35(d), within the rule covering certifying staff and support staff. The surrounding paragraphs set the frame: 145.A.35(a) covers the requirements such staff must meet, 145.A.35(b) the certification authorisation itself, and 145.A.35(c) the experience behind it. Personnel requirements more broadly sit at 145.A.30, including the accountable manager, nominated persons and the compliance monitoring function.
In practice an organisation's continuation training programme covers several recurring strands. Human factors training is the best known — the discipline addressing error, fatigue, communication and the organisational conditions that let a maintenance error reach an aircraft — and it recurs rather than being a one-time induction. Alongside it sit regulatory updates, changes to the organisation's own procedures and exposition, and technical topics tied to the aircraft and systems the organisation maintains, including specialist areas such as fuel tank safety and electrical wiring interconnection systems where the organisation's scope brings them into play.
The defining administrative feature is where the obligation lives. A pilot's licence currency is, in an important sense, the pilot's own problem. A certifying staff member's continuation training is the organisation's problem: the authorisation is issued by the organisation, withdrawn by the organisation, and evidenced by the organisation to its competent authority. The record is therefore an organisational asset, and a gap in it is an organisational finding rather than an individual one.
The content is also partly determined by the organisation itself rather than only by the regulation. When a Part-145 organisation revises its exposition or its procedures, the people working to those procedures need to be trained on the change, and that training is part of the continuation programme. The practical effect is that the programme is never static: it carries a recurring baseline of human factors and regulatory content, plus a variable component driven by whatever the organisation changed that year. An organisation that treats continuation training as a fixed annual course tends to miss the second half entirely.
Why It Matters for Flight Schools
For an MRO, continuation training is a recurring cost that competes directly with billable work. Training hours are hours not spent on aircraft, and the people who most need to be current are usually the ones most in demand on the hangar floor.
That tension is why continuation training slips, and why it slips quietly. Nothing stops when a training item is a month overdue; the authorisation does not automatically switch off, and the work continues. The consequence arrives at the next audit, or worse, in the analysis after an event where a staff member's currency becomes a question.
The record also has to be defensible per person and per topic over a long period, because the question an auditor asks is not whether the organisation runs continuation training but whether this named individual was current in the relevant areas at the time they signed a particular release.
How Aviatize Handles This
Aviatize structures continuation training as courses and events against the individual rather than as a training log kept to one side, so a staff member's record shows which topics were covered, when, and with what result.
Because the syllabus engine handles non-flight events, classroom and workshop-based training sits in the same structure as any other course, and the Digital Data & Records module holds the authorisation and its supporting qualifications as documents with validity dates and expiry alerts.
Compliance & Auditing then covers the organisational side — audit planning, findings tracked to closure, and a digital audit trail — which is the form in which a competent authority actually wants to see that the programme is being run rather than merely written down.