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Old 4th Mar 2007, 23:54
  #12 (permalink)  
Swingwing
 
Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Sydney, Australia
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I think it really depends on what you want out of it (which might sound an obvious thing to say, but bear with me).

Will having a business degree help you get a job in aviation? No.
Will having a pilot's licence help you get a job in business? No.

As aircabbie said, if the only thing you're interested in is being a pilot, best get yourself into whatever aviation related job you can find. For example, having any sort of maintenance qualification or experience will make you much more employable on an airfield than a BBus from Griffith uni or wherever.

Once you're in and established, think about doing the business degree then - you can do plenty of them externally, and being a pilot involves a LOT of time sitting around which you can use to study.

Then, as you get more experienced at both business and flying, you can use the two together. Charter operators and flying schools are the classic low-margin small businesses - accounting, cash flow management, capital investment and all the other stuff you learn about in business school will make a whole lot more sense if you've got some experience in the real world.
The combination of practical and theoretical skills will then make you employable in a much wider range of roles than someone with a basic CPL. And into the future, if you want to be Chief Pilot at QF, understanding revenue, investment and so on would be indispensable!

But as an aside, flying an aircraft is not "management experience" if you're talking about wanting a job in a non-aviation commercial business. I discovered this myself a couple of years back - I had several thousand flying hours, all the "leadership and man management" skills that the military could provide, and an expensive MBA from Harvard.

All that didn't mean much when I was shopping myself around the big end of town here in Sydney - all they wanted to know was what consulting firm I'd worked at, how good I was at modelling cash flows and what profit and loss repsonsibility I'd had in the past. Took a while to convince people of my "personal value proposition" as they put it in the executive headhunting world these days....

But don't let that put you off for a minute - the business degree (particularly when combined with some practical experience) is all about generating options for yourself - and that right there is the key, particularly in a cyclical industry like this one.

So by all means do it - but think carefully about when. A couple of years from now might be a better proposition I think...

hope that helps, and good luck.

SW
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