Marc,
Onya, mate. Walk around for a few days with your chest puffed out, you’ve earned it. Remembering the day I passed the CPL checkride, I remember mostly the sense of anti-climax. Sure, nice to have passed, but it was all of a sudden painfully clear to me how little I knew, and how much more I had to learn…
What next? My advice, for what it’s worth. Unless you have really good contacts, and I mean personal, in an organization where you could fly as a low-time co-pilot, fuggeddabahtit. Everyone has heard about someone who got lucky like that, but then everyone’s heard about the rear-gunner who bailed out of a Lancaster sans parachute and landed in a big snowdrift….
Get ready for, and get positive about, instructing. It’s a great way of building knowledge, skills, and yes, contacts too. My advice would be to start your CFI training first. This will also help a bit with the cashflow thingy since you will start off with ground school and preparing and practicing lesson plans, which won’t be too expensive. When you have a grasp of the psychology and techniques of teaching you will then start practicing flight instructing – very challenging! Getting the CFI will not involve very much flying but it’ll be some of the toughest and most rewarding training you’ll do.
After you get the CFI, work on your IR, and since you already know teaching techniques etc., you can concurrently work towards the CFII. If you do both at the same time, the CFII training will cost you minimal extra $$$ to complete, and it may very well be the difference between you or another guy getting an instructing job. If your FL school needs a Robinson picked up at the factory after overhaul, see if you can go. Should be good for about 30 hours of great cross-country time, and since it needs to be flown anyway, they’ll probably give you a break on the $$$. If an instructing job opens up in the meantime, grab it!!! Don’t let an opportunity slip away, say I sadder but wiser. But you’ll need 200 hours helo time to teach in R22s, which are used by almost every school, so you may as well fill those hours with serious training rather than just joypops.
Currently there’s a serious shortage of CFIs in the US, so get out the resumes as soon as or just before you qualify, be ready and willing to move anywhere for a job, and you’ll soon have that exquisite privilege of being paid to fly. Who knows, you may find you like teaching so much that you’ll want to do it long-term; in that case there’s the LSSI contract at Ft. Rucker, teaching Army pilots primary and IFR in OD JetRangers.