Quote:
Originally Posted by Platapus
The bottom line of my rant is that there are jobs out there that require experience. No college can grant 20+ years experience. The only way to get experience is to start at day one and earn the experience. There are no short cuts, there are no fast-tracks to experience.
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I couldnt agree more.
In the aviation industry - in theory - you have flown as a flight instructor, or you have worked for a crappy small talk cargo carrier hauling checks through bad weather in the dead of night, or you have flown business owners around in small corporate aircraft or any number of things before you get to even the regional airline level.
by the time you get to the airline level, hauling live bodies around the nation, my opinion is that a person deserves more than 17-20K a year.
not that this young man was complaining about the low pay etc... his complaint is that there is nothing for him out there in the world in his chosen trade.
I know what he means, i have been standing there at the airport looking at the airplanes with a whopping 300 hours in my logbook wondering how in the hell i was going to manage to get a job.
the catch 22 is every job is looking for a pilot with 4 times the flight time he has... and his question is "how do i get the flight time if every job out there requires you to already have it?"
the answer has universally been, banner towing, glider towing, or flight instruction. those are the three jobs any newly minted commercial pilot can go out and do with absolutely no experience, with rock bottom flight time.
i have repeatedly suggested instructing as it is the easiest of the three jobs to snatch up - but he lacks confidence in his ability to teach others.
oh well
i wish him all the success in the world, he is a hard worker.
i guess on some level i can sympathize with the young folks.
i always took the attitude that "
they have to earn it just like we did" but i have come to discover that for many of them... the cost of living is just so damned high that they
need the higher salary as an adjustment to the higher cost of living.
i remember some friends of mine who got based in LAX... they said their whole class of new hires all 8 of them lived in the same 2 bedroom apartment because thats the only way they could afford to live in LA. some of them even put sleeping bags in the floor of the closets (nobody used closets for storing clothes due to living out of suitcases) and that was their home.
maybe i just have higher standards for the way people who have invested their life and driven themselves into debt just to find work deserve to live.