Originally Posted by
Avio323
OP, here's a perspective you won't often hear but is worth considering.
The reality is that a lot of people don't ever get that first GA job and even those that do, many (myself included) walked away from the industry after 12 months of working. Things may have changed in recent years (I doubt it), but it was a bad enough experience for me to entirely bin my emotional, financial and time investment in aviation and to then do a further 4 years of study to change my career path entirely.
As others have mentioned it's not all to do with the operators either, GA pilots were for the most part backstabbers who would climb over anybody else for progression and the small town culture was a cesspool.
If I had my time again, I would have just paid the dollars and went the cadet path from day one. Everyone I knew who did this at the time, the closest any come to GA was a stint as safety pilot on a metro and were all fast tracked to a RHS turboprop or jet job.
Sometimes I get the itch, especially when I hear 'pilot shortage', but then I come back here for a reminder that nothing has really changed...
I "sense" that in my limited experience door knocking until my knuckles bleed, so to speak. I helped two fellow students in my class when they struggled to fly a simple ILS in the sim - one failed their flight test. I was coming into the school after hours to help them (I had already passed my flight test). They both managed to get jobs and I've never heard from them again (I've asked if they could submit my resume- one never responded and the other said 'not hiring'!). I guess the lesson here is "the world owes you nothing even if you give it something". I've come to learn that if you don't already know someone in the company that you are trying to apply for, you have a very SLIM chance (<10%) of getting a job.
There was a case where one dude put his resume into an Operator up here and then told his mate about the same job. The mate went into the Operator and told the HOO the original dude wasn't interested in the job anymore, then submitted his own resume over the top! Dirty tactics of trying to get that first job.