In my view there's not going to be any significant hiring for at least 3 to 5 years. My advice would be stay in your job, work slowly, aim for a CPL SE IR and sit on it. Enjoy your flying for a bit. If/when hiring restarts the upgrade to ME IR and APS MCC will leave you reasonably current. Beware of any ATO that asks for large sums of money upfront. If there aren't some big integrated schools going to the wall in the next two years I would be astonished. They are all advertising modular courses but there is no way they can ever get their cost base down to even begin to compete with the best modular ATOs. An example would be
- Leading Edge MEIR, price now POA but last time I looked £35K,
- L3 MEIR £39,500,
- Skyborne combined CPL MEIR APS/MCC £44,500
whilst comparable modular offerings are
- Diamond in Sweden, which is just the dogs, £30K for a modular MEIR including accommodation etc. £25K not.
- Stapleford modular CPL ME IR £22K (if I have read it right)
- VA APS MCC about £7K, Wings Alliance similar.
Integrated are not even close, they can't compete. Integrated course recruitment has dropped to near zero, no modular income = bust