From air traffic controller to HR chief: a career journey at NAV CANADA

Joining an organization in a frontline operations role and moving through various functions is a great way to develop a solid understanding of all aspects of an organization, according to Diana Kelly, Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at NAV CANADA – Canada’s private, not-for-profit provider of air navigation services based in Ottawa.

Kelly speaks from experience – lots of practical, operational experience. She says she started as a front-line air traffic controller, spent nearly two decades in operations, and moved through regional leaderships, corporate strategy, and safety oversight before arriving in HR.

“Starting as an air traffic controller has given me such a strong foundational understanding of our organization, and not just air traffic control roles, but also the other groups that I’ve collaborated with, the realities of shift work, and what it means to talk to airplanes and work emergencies,” Kelly says.

That depth of experience has produced something many HR leaders work years to achieve: a genuine seat at the executive table.

From the tower to the C-suite

Kelly’s path through NAV CANADA has been deliberately varied. After 18 years in operations – including positions in Winnipeg and Edmonton – she transitioned to the corporate side, learning business functions she hadn’t previously experienced. From there, she moved into safety oversight before stepping into her current role.

“What you see in my career trajectory is that many times I’ve stepped into a role that was unfamiliar to me or was with a new team,” she says. “I left operations after 18 years and learned about the business side of the organization, future planning, our traffic forecasting, and a lot of things I didn’t have exposure to.”

That cross-functional fluency now shapes how Kelly builds her own team – and what she asks of it. Understanding financial realities, project pressures, and operational rhythms helps give HR the standing to be in the room when consequential decisions are made, according to Kelly.

“I know that, from HR colleagues in other organizations, sometimes they feel like they have to fight to be heard at the executive table, and I don’t feel like that,” she says. “Understanding the business and being able to talk about the financial realities and projects that we’re implementing – beyond the traditional HR world – allows us to be really embedded in business decisions when they’re made.”

It reflects a broader shift in Canada, where – as explored in HRD Canada’s analysis of whether HR leaders visible at the table are truly influential – credibility at the executive level is earned through operational literacy, not people management expertise alone.

A leadership program built from scratch

Kelly believes that one of her most significant accomplishments in her role is the development of a bespoke leadership training program – something NAV CANADA hadn’t had before, she says.

Launched in 2023 as the organization emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, Kelly says the program was designed to rebuild morale and re-establish a shared cultural baseline. It began with NAV CANADA’s management team and has since expanded to supervisors. An April 2026 leadership conference was a milestone: for the first time, every manager at the organization attended the same event, delivered across two sessions.

“We had never delivered one event to our leadership team at any point in our history,” Kelly says. “And so this was the first time, and it’s allowed us to grow with the leadership team. We can identify the topics that we want to talk about, and we get feedback from them about where do we want to take this next year.”

The program blends business context with skills-based learning, including role-playing exercises and sessions with guest speakers, according to Kelly. The challenge she was solving will resonate with any HR leaders preparing to steady organizations through disruption: restoring cohesion and shared direction after sustained organizational turbulence is one of the defining tasks facing the profession.

“Things change quickly in our society now, and so it also allows us to kind of re-baseline with our leaders on an ongoing basis that they can predict that we’re going to keep doing,” she says.

Closing the talent pipeline gap

NAV CANADA’s people challenges extend well beyond culture. The organization is managing one of the most demanding talent pipelines in Canada: qualifying air traffic services professionals who require years of highly specialized training before they can operate independently.

Kelly is candid about the scale of the shortfall. “We’re about 200 controllers below target. That is a real delta,” she says. “We’re making progress against that though, so it’s starting to decline.”

Approximately 550 people are currently in training at NAV CANADA – more than at any point in the organization’s history – and new qualifications are outpacing departures, according to Kelly. A partnership with CAE, a Montreal-based aerospace simulation and training company, has brought more than 500 additional people into the training system, and all schools are at full capacity, she says.

“We have to take a long-term lens on our staffing movements, demographics, and attrition and recruitment trends, and plan well in advance for that,” says Kelly. “We want to make sure that we get the right people into the system. It’s not a job for everybody.”

NAV CANADA works closely with its unions and continuously explores ways to modernize talent acquisition – the kind of sustained recruitment focus that Canadian employers across all sectors are grappling with, as detailed in HRD Canada’s coverage of how Canadian employers are navigating complex hiring and talent shortages, as global competition for trained professionals intensifies.

AI with a human lens

Artificial intelligence is reshaping aviation internationally. At NAV CANADA, those conversations are live – but governed by a safety-first framework, according to Kelly.

“For all the technical capabilities of the future, we look at them as a way to complement what our people are delivering,” Kelly says. “We do things with our people, not to our people, and so it’s about evaluating things together.”

Kelly draws a direct line between safety culture and organizational culture at NAV CANADA, and argues they must develop in parallel.

“We have a safety culture of reporting, bringing ideas to light – a non-punitive environment – but then we also have an organizational culture of trust and caring for each other. These two blend,” she says. “We share information from culture surveys, safety culture surveys, and plans from organizational culture to create an environment that’s paying attention to both the human component and the safety component.”

Any material change – including the adoption of AI tools – goes through rigorous safety evaluations before entering the regulated environment, says Kelly.

“Any transformation like AI – although tools can revolutionize things – has to come through both of these lenses as well,” she says. “What does it mean to our people is an impact on safety.”

It is a posture that reflects something fundamental to Kelly’s approach: the most consequential people decisions are never made in isolation from the work itself. For a leader who once co-ordinated airspace from an area control centre, that’s not philosophy. It’s instinct.