Your Competition!
I sympathise with you guys and Desk Pilot nice post = pherhaps a cautionary warning to all those gullable 20 year olds who are going to mortgage their parents home for an ıntegrated course. Not everybody goes to BA or walks in to a job.
The good news is there are many jobs and lots of movement in the UK. As I see it the problem is that compared with 10 years ago there are many guys\gals who now have the right to live and work in the UK = Welcome to JAR land. These Pilots are from countries were the aviation business is not so good, particularly Scandinavia, and they too have an even bigger over supply of wanabees per head of population. Most of them are well trained, have experiance, Type Ratings, smart, good English etc and the airlines in the UK will take them. In some respects they are at an advantage because they dont pay VAT\sales tax on training and get proper student loans from the Goverment for training. The airlines in the UK dont care were you get your experiance, if you got it and can pass the assesment your in. I can even give examples were a certain Agency based in the UK has recruited overseas pilots for jobs whilst guys\gals who are from the UK, trained there, with more experiance have not even got so much as a call back. Me thinks there is some tax dodge to be had to make more Cash?
Even our very own BALPA at the Oct Careers conference managed to bring on an Italian girl to explain to British Wannabes how she just landed her first Job with Flybe in the UK. I can only describe this as bad taste. Well done BALPA a great example of just how pathetically your representing those with low hrs residing and training in the UK looking for their first break. And before somebody posts blah, blah you brits need to learn another langauage etc then you can work in another country to.....we dont need to the jobs are in the UK.
Im not trying to have a go, many of the colleagues I fly with are from overseas, my friends, and are very talented. My point is to those in the UK looking for their first break, there are jobs but you have to understand what your competition is its good, its experianced and more of it than ever before from Europe, USA\Canada, Oz and NZ. Your going to have to think out of the BOX to compete with it and do something to make yourself stand out of the pilot pool like these guys\gals are............because of a lack of oppetunities in THEIR home land.
Good Luck.