job related rant

[nikimcbee]

How saturated is the job market with pilots? It sounds like the same situation, but with social studies teachers. They are a dime a dozen.

...or you go work in a less desirable market. Be a bush pilot in Alaska.

[Bubblehead Nuke]

Even worse are people who show up for work and want to start at 75-80K a year and never do any of the 'gunt work' that any job field requires. Not a day of actual experience and they expect to max out the earning potential.

I do not know how many times I have told some young kid: "It does not matter that you graduated from 'such and such' school with high honors." You are gonna start here on the bottom of the heap and work up.

I seem to have a high turnover rate because I do not give in and give them the pay they feel they deserve. They think the grass is greener elsewhere and I *WISH* I could be there when reality smacks them in the forehead. Over half come back within 6 months and ask if they could work for my company (and me) again.

[Platapus]

Originally Posted by Bubblehead Nuke

Even worse are people who show up for work and want to start at 75-80K a year and never do any of the 'gunt work' that any job field requires. Not a day of actual experience and they expect to max out the earning potential.

I do not know how many times I have told some young kid: "It does not matter that you graduated from 'such and such' school with high honors." You are gonna start here on the bottom of the heap and work up.

I might as well hop on the Rant-o-Van.

We had a discussion about this on one of our intranet forums. Young people are hired into my industry (Geopolitical Analysis) but leaving after 2 years because they are bored or are not being used to "their" capability.

I have 27 years experience, a Master's Degree (ABD on my Doctorate) and I am only slightly above average in experience/education. I know that I, and many of my co-workers sound like curmudgeons (and we are), when we talk about it taking years to even start getting a reputation in my industry.

When I started out in the 1980's grunt, crappy research projects were all there was. It took me about 5 years before getting my first nice project and I was lucky to get that. It was actually a research project no one else wanted, but, through hard work by my team, turned out to be pretty cool.

Yeah, I am a crotchity old man, but the facts are clear. In my industry, it takes years to start establishing a reputation that gets you the good assignments. The kids are graduating with their Bachelor's degree and zero experience and expecting not only the six figure salary but also the pick of the projects.

WTF? Everyone else had to work up from the grunt work. Did we like getting crappy assignments? Of course not. We hated it. But we looked at it from an "investment" point of view. If I do well on the crap assignments, soon I will "graduate" to the better assignments, and later even better assignments.

It seems like the younger generation wants, and I hate to use an over used term, instant gratification. They want the cool projects right away and they expect the better assignments even though they don't have the experience and judgment to handle them.

So what is happening is that our industry is losing potentially good analysts who are unwilling to accept the concept of working up from the bottom and the value of experience. This is not good for my industry as us curmudgeons are getting a bit long in the tooth and we are starting to die off.

One of the problems is that PA has lousy PR.

Political Analysis is a job that everyone thinks they can do and yes, as we tell people, anyone can be a political analyst, the question is can they be a good political analyst? What is the difference between a Political Analyst and a good Political Analyst?

About 20 years and a doctorate.

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.

Sometimes I think the younger generation in my industry either don't understand this, or don't want to accept it.

Hey, if there is one thing a curmudgeon can do is rant right?

[GoldenRivet]

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.

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.

[Platapus]

So much for the myth of the "glamorous" life of an Airline Pilot.

<20K does stynk.

Do Pilots get any type of per diem when they have to stay outside their home?

[GoldenRivet]

my per diem was $1.55 per hour

IIRC that was for up to 14 hours per day.

anyhow, it really amounted to enough to buy food while on duty.

[Platapus]

That does stynk

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by nikimcbee

...or you go work in a less desirable market. Be a bush pilot in Alaska.

Or fly MiGs for Qaddafi...