Hmm, why Flt Ops?
I would thoroughly recommend that you dispense with the brochure showing Flt Lt Miggins sitting in Ops at Goose Bay and rethink this one.
The job is less than 5 years old and fighting for cred. The RAF is instutionalised and slow to embrace change. The pilot is King. Therefore you will ALWAYS find youself in situations where doors will be closed because you're not, and never were aircrew.
Ops is an aviation related position, and as such deserves the recognition accordingly, after all without it the whole process will very quickely dry up. therefore it is particularly irksome to be constantly undermined by people with a dead budgie on their chest.
I you refer to APOLLOs post, above,regarding an undividual being posted to a job where it was felt that it was an aircrew job. Utter hoop, if people are given the correct training and opportunites what's yer problem! Says a lot about the RAFs attitude to Equal Opportunities and valuing individuals contributions etc.
The brighter members of the fraternity see this and complain that the job is unfullfilling, with no sense of purpose and very poor job satisfaction. On many units FOOs are under employed so they end up carrying out the secondary duties that nobody else wants to do, filling their time with writing visiting instructions, dealing with flying complaints and so on.
There is also the added problem that the flight operations managers, FOM (SNCOs) and flight operations assistants,FOA (Airmen) come under the ATC Branch for training, career issues etc, and have actually had a far more useful initial training than their commissioned counterparts and are employed in a far more diverse environment, from ATC towers to Sqn Ops, to Stn Ops and so on. At present the FOTS course doesn't adequately cover aircraft ops areas, seriously undermining their credibility, in fact there is nothing an OpsO can do that a Cpl couldn't do, and in fact does routinely. The on the job training that should exist at unit level is non existant, due in the main to idleness and the ridiculously short tours these poor people have to endure, which results in a disproportionate reliance on the SNCOs to provide the training. This further weakens the structure as the SNCOs have a primary duty for the training and welfare of their airmen/women, not their bl00dy officers
Also, something you won't hear a lot of, but like any organisation, budgets are now a fundemental feature of daily life. Stn Cdrs now hold the entire Budget for their units, which includes the wages for all the personnel located there. Growing numbers of units are scrutinising the wage bill and endeavouring to assess whether a task can be achieved more economically. When it comes to ops rooms the answer is yes. The result, yup you've guessed it, replace OpsOs with SNCOs, they're cheaper far more experienced, understand the 'company' procedures and so on. Two units in particular have alledgedly started to implement this policy already. At my unit, it is hoped that two OpsO slots will go, thus saving the unit in excess of 100 grand.
All in all not a satisfactory state of affairs, the Branch presently conducts yearly 'seminars' around the RAF, an opportunity for feedback and a forum for everybody to be apart of the way ahead, unfortunately there are so many dissillusioned OpsOs that it looks like a radical rethink is needed.
If I were you I would seriously rethink your options and maybe consider Int or ATC.