Its not just the airlines ANOTHER ton, the "cost-focus" management style is I believe a symptom of the whole aerospace industry. I was recently talking with a design engineer with a certain large manufacturer ( not Boeing there's a hint
) about how many new graduates etc. they are taking. He was telling me that they are going nuts trying to find relatively young but experienced people at the moment. Because there is such a distinct lack of such people they have had to lower their requirements and have in the most case accepted that they aren't going to get anyone with experience and so have recruited a raft of graduates knowing that they'll have to get the senior engineers to hold their hands for a while before they are fully competent. Something which, he added, is starting to grate on the senior people who didn't sign up to train people day in day out. The manufacturing companies are really paying for it now on training costs because there are so few middle-level engineers with experience since they cut back on the training and recruitment for the last few years. Why can't these manager-types see that by cutting training and recruitment in the short term they are setting up a landmine for themselves further down the road? Isn't the obvious solution a relatively consistent level of training and recruitment year in year out or am i trying to be too sensible?
With regard to people going to do engineering degrees rather than apprenticeships in my experience part of the blame has to lie with school career services and the education system. Most school career services are fairly ignorant of the routes into engineering depending on the type of work you want to do and they are naturally motivated to pushing people towards the universities because of the league tables. When i was at school and said "I want to be an engineer!" the careers advsior never said "Right, lets see what different routes into that are on offer." No instead his automatic response was "Right lets look at what kind of engineering
degrees you can apply for." I am sure most graduates would have similar experiences. I know several graduates who would never have started their degree if they had known that in order to get into line maintenance an apprenticeship was the way to go. I am glad to hear though from some posters that for graduates who do want to get into line maintenance the door isn't completely slammed shut but just a bit more awkward to open
