Been a while since I’ve posted on Pprune! Glad you’ve found my blog posts useful. I felt I’d post to clear up your confusion.
An MPL route takes you from nothing to the right hand seat of that airlines aircraft. An Airline associated ATPL will do the same, I.e. easyjet ATPL or BA ATPL. A whitetail program provides you with an Frozen ATPL but you must then find a job with an airline after the fact.
At the moment the average wait to a job is about 6 months. In my case I landed the job offer in 2 months, but in total from graduation to the start of my type rating will be just over 6 months wait. So while I’ve sat in the type rating pool as such, I had a job offer there. This said, friends of mine had waited in L3’s placement pool for 6 months and very recently landed a job at the same airline I have and yet start their type ratings 2 weeks after me. I say this to just to highlight to you that whether you get the job straight away and wait for a Type rating date or wait a few months and get the job and type rating date soon after one another; there is still a wait.
This is by no means exclusive to the orange carrier either. Other friends of mine landed jobs with EuroWings within 4 months of graduation but even they are going to be waiting until Feb/March for their type ratings. Same story with TUI too, BA and Turkish Airlines too. Ultimately, unless you end up at Ryanair who very recently have had super quick turn arounds from selection to flying the line, you will be waiting a certain undetermined period of time to start that first job.
My best advice for anyone is to not go into to thing without having a fair grasp on the subject. The amount of people who seemingly start the courses with no knowledge of the ins-and-outs scares me given their, or more likely, their family’s investments.
My next comment would be to worry about the hurdles that are in front of you first before being concerned with the job prospect. Aviation continues to grow at fast rates - despite Brexit - so the jobs will be there for you should you do everything well. Heck, even if you slip up evidence suggests the airlines still consider you. In the end I was offered interviews with 3 major airlines despite a second series CPL.
Best of luck!
George.