Some facts on time to upgrade
I thought I would interject and add some prognostications that are, hopefully, based on solid assumptions. I will put more 'flesh' on my work on our own internal forums. But just thought anyone wanting to join should have a more accurate idea of what to expect in terms of upgrades.
Assumptions
Using last five years average for command upgrades, FO upgrades.
SO to FO
If you joined on 1st Jan 2018 you can expect to upgraded to SO in four(4) years. Having said that, almost 25% of our FOs last year were DEFOs. If that continues then the time to go from SO to FO would be five(5) years.
Joining till command date
Based on the last five years it would be 21 years.
What effect has the training ban had? If I ignore 2016-2017 and used 2013-2015 figures, I get the same time for SO-FO but the command time will increase to 27 years. Ironically, since management have prioritised commands in 2016 and 2017 (we are halfway through getting about 50 shiny new airbuses) the command time will reduce dramatically to about 17 years.
Now my maths is inherently flawed as I am using a simple average on a growing organism. However - for the last 3 years we haven't been growing. We actually were smaller mid 2017 than we were at end of 2014.
So I think if we continued to grow at the rate we did for the two decades before the training ban, a more realistic time to command would be just over 14 years. Time to FO would reduce very slightly - maybe 3.4-4.5 years.
TLDR
SO to FO 4-5 years
SO to CN 14-17 years