I was extremely fortunate to be offered both a job with Ryanair and with a turboprop operator towards the end of 2008 just as things really started drying up. As a wannabe who had a grand total of only 207 hours and had gone down a mixed school modular route I was shocked to get either offer as I had expected to need to get an FI rating and do that for a few years. Faced with the choice, I took the turboprop job. I paid a small proportion of my type rating with the rest being funded by the operator. I just couldn't justify taking the risk with Ryanair. Being a contractor they can lay you off at any time. I have a watertight contract with my current carrier, I fly 50-60 hours a month and take home a reasonable, if not particularly spectacular wage, but what really matters to me is that I have stability that I'm not certain I would have had at Ryanair.
I got the turboprop job by networking, I came down to the airlines' base and sat around until I could catch the Chief Pilot for a five minute chat. It worked. They had never advertised the job and it was purely luck that I turned up the day after he had lost on of his other FOs to Jet2.
I do a lot of hand flying, and in my first 100 or so hours I have seen my flying skills rocket. I can't recommend it enough! There are a very limited number of turboprop jobs out there, but you need to get out there and search for them, you can't just send out CV after CV and hope they will come to you.
I now feel that when this downturn does finally come to an end, and that will probably still be a long way off, hopefully I will have about 1,000 hours of turboprop flying and I will be able to move up the ladder onto a regional jet or maybe even something bigger. But for the timebeing I am having the time of my life at a total cost of about £44,000 including all of my initial flight training and my type rating costs. Had I gone to Ryanair this would have been nearer £63,000 with the current £/€ exchange rate.